Free RSS Reader

Last week I reviewed the overpriced Byline, an RSS reader that requires a Google Reader account. I like things simple so I decided to give Simon Oualid’s app a try. It seemed to work great at first, but after adding a couple of Yahoo! Sports feeds, the thing just froze up. Or at least that’s the way it looked.

The first few times I tried opening my Yahoo feeds and the app stopped responding, I just assumed it had crashed so I hit the ‘home’ button to exit which usually took 30-60 seconds. Later on I figured out that the feed would eventually open, but not until after that 30-60 second wait during which the app would basically play dead and become unresponsive.

This thing would be super if it weren’t for the excruciating wait time to open certain feeds. It’s got a very simple interface and an in-app browser so that you can see your feed content in its original form, and it’ll also tell you if an RSS feed is available when you put in a URL and visit the site… but none of that matters if you have feeds that cause the app to suffer minor heart attacks on a regular basis.

Byline may be overpriced at $4.99 (it was “on sale” at the time of my review) but it works like it’s supposed to, so I’m sticking with that app for now. Simon also has a premium version called Pro RSS Reader which I haven’t tried that costs $1.99 , but I sincerely hope it’s more stable than what I experienced with his free deal.

An update is pending in the iTunes App Store… maybe that’ll fix the problem?