[jsnell]

RSS is a good example of an area where having an application be backed by a service brings huge value to a lot of people. If you want to access your feeds from multiple different machines, synchronization becomes awkward with a purely local app. It gets even more awkward if you want to do it from multiple different platforms.

You could use some commercial non-Google service as the backend instead, but those could equally well get cancelled. You could maybe host your own service and have full control, but the installation and maintenance is a huge time sink. And in both cases the amount of applications you could choose from is likely going to be smaller than with Reader.

There can also be other benefits in sharing the service with other people. For Reader, the infinite feed history was a biggie for me. It really was quite amazing to subscribe to a 4-year old podcast, and have easy access to all the 200 podcasts from that period even if the current feed only showed the 10 latest ones.

(I used Liferea for a while maybe 10 years ago, and even contributed some code at the time. But ultimately even the web-based RSS readers of 2005 had a better workflow than a local RSS reader. Sure, the UI sucked and you were completely at the service provider's mercy. But at least it was possible to access your feeds both from work and from home.)