Proof free does not mean inferior
Response from developer
Thank you for the great review! Your words are exactly why I made this. Makes me happy that you saw that 🥰
Clean, sharp, functional & perfect
It’s really quite excellent!! 👍👍👍
Response from developer
OMG... premier RSS reader on the market?! Thank you so much ❤️ Happy to hear you are finding the Otter great to use!
The RSS reader we all need
Response from developer
"Clean and simple interface" 👈 This is exactly why I created it! Thank you for the kind review and the donation. Hope you keep enjoying the Otter!
Very good so far
This app works for me. I use it for the news sources I have, because I don't want to pollute my other RSS app with politics. I think we all need a break from politics from time to time, don't you?
I would like this app to have two choices for when people open it up: 1- That the sidebar showing each news feed under it's own grouping is open upon opening the app and 2- in addition, to keep it's current setting.
I like to have, say, all my ABC articles under one tab, all my DEF articles in another tab. I do not prefer the way it currently is, where I have to manually open the sidebar.
Otherwise, this app is very simple and very easy. Also, I didn't check before leaving this review, and I can't close this review to go look, but what I would like to have is the ability to save individual articles in reader mode (no ads, just text) onto PDF. I also would like to have a favorites folder, organized by site, to store monumental articles.
Response from developer
Hello! Sorry for taking so long to get back to this review. Life took over and I've been working on a new version (1.2.0) which has a lot of user feedback and is waiting for review right now. "1- That the sidebar showing each news feed under it's own grouping is open upon opening the app and 2- in addition, to keep it's current setting." 👈 These are coming! Some of these are a limitation in my early design decision (since I originally made this app just for me) so I'm slowly reworking these things! Reader mode and folder organization is also coming in the future as well!
Doesn’t try to be too much
You can't find any better RSS app than this
Josh, you again did it!!
Background app refresh
However, the background app refresh is not working. I had the same number of unread feeds from what I did twelve hours ago on launch. I pulled down and did a refresh and 30+ articles popped into my feeds. So it appears that is not working.
Response from developer
Hello! Auto refresh is coming is coming in version 1.1.1 later this week 🙂 Background refresh is scheduled by the OS. It will get refreshed at every 30 minutes at the minimum but could take longer. The more you use the app the bigger the priority those refreshes will come. iOS stuff 🤷♂️ And I wanted to have the same webview on Mac as iOS but there is a bug on Mac that didn’t allow me to use the same webview ☹️ Me and my wife also just had a baby so I couldn’t sink all of my time into fixing that the (yet). I do have plans to get some reader view working on Mac though! Thank you so much for the kind review ❤️ I hope you keep enjoying your Otter experience!
Not bad for an early release
The reader mode is nicest I've seen so far. You can create folders and move your feeds into them, you can import opml from other apps which maintains folder hierarchy if that app supports folders.
What it needs.
Mark articles read on scrolling past them
Option to hide read articles by default instead of manually hiding all the time.
When clicking on a top level folder it expands the folder clicking the arrow should expand the folder. There is no way to view all stories in a top folder. For example I have a tech folder and have to go to every single sub folder and read the stories I should be able to just click the tech folder and see the stories in that folder.
Needs swipe gestures example swipe right mark read/unread swipe left add to favorite.
When viewing stories there is about a quarter inch of empty space on the left and right making appear almost window boxed. The story headlines should go the width of the screen to see more words in the title.
Need to add an option to sort by oldest and newest first.
If in reader mode hitting the safari button should open in the in app browser instead of leaving the app. If we want to leave the app from that screen the safari button should open in your default browser.
Under notifications there should be an option to show badge count with unread articles.
Should be an option to see favicons to the left of the headline to quickly see at a glance which site posted the story as well as an option to enable images if there is one in the story. Either a small image to the right of the headline or a large image below the headline.
All in all it's a really good start it's just not ready to be my main RSS app for now I'm sticking with Reeder and NetNewsWire. I am going to keep Otter installed and look forward to future updates.
Can't get it to work
Edit 2: got two responses here and still no email from support. Developer seems to care more about reviews than providing support
Original "review":
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Easy to use, but very simple!
The interface is simple and very clean. The animations are smooth!
Only disappointing element is each article just opens a web wrapper. Therefore, unlike other RSS readers that give you a unified reading experience across publications, this merely links you to the site of the publisher.
Some might like this, though personally I use RSS to provide me with one reading interface across each source I read. So I suppose it does give you a simple location to organize all the sites you read, but a similar experience could be had by bookmarking each site you frequent and visiting them directly.
Response from developer
Glad you finding it easy to use! That wasn’t exactly why I created Otter 🙂 The webview is what makes this Otter “the most okayest”. The initial goal was not to have a unified experience but simply stay subscribe and stay updated - as you’ve experienced 😉 But getting a unified reading experienced is on the to do list! It’s not top priority but I will get there. Thank you for the kind review ❤️
