Android RSS Readers

I have been trying to find an RSS reader for Android and I wasn't having any luck.  Like most technology, each person uses it in a different way.  I want to use rss feeds so that I can be notified about updates to websites or software that I like.  I don't want these websites to email me about updates, but I do want notifications.  In another article, I will be talking about the need for an open protocol to fill this gap, but for now, I will be using rss feeds.  For this purpose, the main thing I want is for my phone and tablet (and soon my Android TV!) to post a notification when a website has made a change.  Some webpages don't update very frequently and when I'm waiting for the latest version of some piece of software, I don't want to check the site over and over again.  Other notifications include new Youtube videos being posted.  The idea (the original idea with rss) is that I don't have to check anywhere.  I just get notified of changes.  I can then read it right away, or later if I'm too busy.

The obvious choice was to start with Google Reader.  I started getting frustrated with it pretty fast.  I was having issues with the update interval with Google Reader.  Google refused to let me force a refresh of my rss feeds.  Unfortunately, most Android rss readers are not actually rss readers.  They are 3rd party Google Reader apps.  This means they don't actually download the rss feed.  They use a Google api to list the available news articles.  This isn't unreasonable, since Google can download the feeds while the app just asks Google "is there something new?"  This reduces mobile bandwidth which is a good thing.  When Google Reader isn't giving me real time updates, though, this means this entire class of Android app are useless to me.

The next class of rss readers are the news readers.  These apps support rss feeds but their main goal is for you to read the news inside of the app.  They spend most of their time making the app user friendly and have lots of eye candy.  If I was going to spend a lot of my time in an app, I would want it to be user friendly.  This isn't what I want in a reader, however.  These apps tend to be overkill, and you end up paying for it in battery and data in the long run.  Since these apps are intended for you to read your news articles inside of them, they pre-download all of your news articles.  This includes images and other content.  Pre-downloading allows you to view your news offline.  This is handy for the subway commuter who wants to read news on their commute too and from work, but not for a notification system.

I finally found a true rss reader: RssDemon.  This was a nice tool, but it had problems reading some of my feeds.  Those feeds would come up with zero news articles available.  I don't know if it was a parse error or what.  It just didn't support some of the feeds I wanted to monitor.  Finally I found Sparse rss.  The name alludes to the fact that there isn't many features in this app.  It reads feeds and notifies you when there is a new item.  The widget wasn't that great.  It was hard to tell where one item stopped and the next started.  I haven't figured out how to scroll through the entries.  When adding the widget, a config screen opened up.  I don't how to get back to that config screen after adding the widget.  As a stop gap, I can remove then re-add the widget to access the config again.

Overall, Sparse rss is good enough for now.  It allows me to get notifications for rss items, which is the most important thing for me.