Leave a Review Feedly
Please no happy “you’re done!” cartoons
Because when I’ve just read a comic or a fun article about skin care or whatever, that would be fine, but when I’ve just read a dark, depressing news item about people dying or the economy tanking, it is SUPER jarring and weird to see a happy smiling ‘toon congratulating me for reading all the things. And it’s more often that second situation that the first, so...please.
I wrote a similar review a few years back when y’all decided a chipper cartoon dinosaur was what people needed after they finished reading the news. I discovered that one for the first time literally after reading about a hate crime, and it was awful. The dinosaur went away quickly and I can only assume it was because others felt much as I do. The only comics I need in my Feedly are the ones I subscribe to. Please no smiley congratulatory cartoon figures, anywhere. Or at least give us an way to opt out of that. All that’s needed is the green check mark. Less is more.Show lessKimiTX
Switching back to Feedly Classic
I’m not the one who is sour about every new version of every product. Generally, I like when things evolve and move forward. However, I think Feedly missed the point. The old version was just so much more “comfortable” to use. I find that swipe gestures in this new app are much more strict and unforgiving. It’s literally painful to operate this app because you have to get the angle of the swipes so precisely otherwise they won’t work.
I just now switched back to the older style “Feedly Classic” app which works wonderfully.
There is one feature I miss from the classic app - that is the ability to search across all articles. (For the record, the new version doesn’t get it right either.) I am syncing with Google and have an extensive set of feeds, neatly organized. I’d like to be able to find older articles by searching for key words.
The pro subscription feature is not interesting to me. Would be OK paying a one-time fee to upgrade, but not willing to make ongoing payments, especially not one this high.Show lessGregV8
Developer Response
Hello Greg, thank you for your feedback. We moved to continuous scrolling because the devices have a lot of variability in size now and getting the right layout is harder. And more importantly, we have a lot of existing (highlights, notes) and future (summarization, metadata) features where a fixed height per article was too constraining. We did paged initially because devices (specially Android devices) did not have the performance needed to implement a nice smooth continuous scrolling but this is no longer the case. The old app had 5 years of love poured into it. The new app is only 6 months old (but build using a tech stack that is giving us the opportunity iterate and improve the experience a lot faster). The challenge for us is to find the gaps and pick the optimizations that make sense and try to bring the new app on par for ALL our users Power Search is a Pro feature because it runs on our servers for what we need to pay.Missing features the old Feedly had - internal browser is back!
Update: at some point, safari was added back to the app as an “internal browser” option in settings. Now jut put the feeds button back at the top, (since navigation for the rest of the app is located there) and this rating is back to 5 stars.
Continuous scrolling is good. Responsive app good. Moving the feeds button from upper left to lower left is bad. Removing the in app safari browser is terrible, as not all feeds contain the whole article and you are forced to jump to safari. Then to get back to Feedly you need to leave safari. But if you forget to close the tab then your safari fills up with tabs. Too. Many. Taps. Just add safari back to the app and this rating improves by a lot.Show lessfisc3577
Worst update in history
Somehow y’all managed to make the most opened app on my phone utterly unusable.
I don’t know which 4,000 users you consulted but they should just go download twitter or use apple news if they want more pictures than words. The most intriguing aspect of your app for me was the ability to immerse myself with readable content from a multitude of sources. Even just comparing the amount of articles displayed on screen in list type from old to new you can see the app was LITERALLY dumbed down with the update.
Whoever was in charge of the new version of the app needs to be fired, that panel of 4,000 people should not be allowed to download the classic version, whoever was being snarky and committed the typo in the description of Classic version needs to be demoted or at least a reprimand letter, and promote or at least give a bonus to whoever saved your company from falling to newsify by putting out the Classic version. The second you change or mess with the classic version you will begin the timer to your company’s demise.Show lessreader not viewer
Developer Response
Hello, is there something about the new design that you don't like? You can contact care@feedly.com if you want to share more feedback. We love candid feedback. Thank you. -PetrStill a fan, but ...
Latest redesign is fine; clean, attractive, and generally easy to use ... but I have one huge complaint. There used to be more white space at the end of articles, before the share/website buttons. That’s now gone, and it means that as I’m reading an article and scrolling as I go, I end up with a gentle scroll inadvertently closing the article, before I even realize I’m close to the end. Please fix this! Either add some more white space between the end of the text and the buttons, so it registers more readily that I’m at the bottom, or increase the amount of “swiping up” it takes to actually close the article. It’s super annoying to constantly need to re-open the article and scroll back to the bottom — very carefully! — to finish reading.Show lessdeedubyakay
Another update that didn’t need to be done
*update* I just updated to this latest release. I have to give you props for listening to your users. I don’t know about others but it looks like you have at least addressed my biggest concerns. Of course my needs don’t sound as complex as what a lot of people are doing. Just want to be able to attach to several feeds, read my news and not have to jump through hoops to do it. I might actually be able to use this version. I will at least give it a try.
I loved Feedly, read it everyday. It was clear and simple to set up and use. Now it’s practically indecipherable to me. Developers just seem to want to make changes whether they are actually improvements or not. Making an app more complicated to use is definitely not an improvement. How do I go back to the old version? Switched to Feedly classic. I wonder how many of the few positive reviews of the new version are actually posted by Feedly employees, because I have a hard time believing that anyone would like having to go through more steps to get the same results. For instance, old Feedly click on an article go immediately to web page. New Feedly, it takes you to another page that may have two more lines of information. Then you have to click again to go to web page. What a boneheaded change. I sometimes think developers live in their own little universe and don’t really think through how things are going to work in the real universe.Show lessLeeGeeeeeee
Evernote is gone
I’ve been a pro user for years, both to support and because of the clean Evernote integration. If it’s there it’s buried. Infinite scroll is terrible as well for me personally. My feeds are endless, loved ‘accomplishing’ something by getting to the bottom so I didn’t feel I had to read everything in the world. Feels like just another oversimplified app with much of the functionality that made it worth paying for gutted. I’m on an iPhone (and not a phablet). Going to classic for now, will see if I renew. Oh - the slide function (read/delete I think) is a good idea but doesn’t work. Sliding all the way across the screen is hard if not impossible(I haven’t gotten it to work once). Some of these features might have potential - more testing, and please stop removing features that we rely on for our workflow!Show lessTimMohler
People don’t like change but...
Sometimes change is necessary to move the product forward so that is relevant to new users.
But let’s be honest, this rollout was done very poorly. A lot of the things many people miss about the old version actually are available in the new one if you dig into the settings. But unfortunately Feedly didn’t see fit to provide any instruction on how to find them.
They have been very responsive on Twitter, which is good. And some of the things I can’t do anymore have been replaced by arguably better features. Unfortunately it was annoyingly hard to figure out how to use these new features and cost me way too much time.
For what it’s worth I would recommend rolling out changes incrementally rather than overhauling the whole system all at once.
Two last points:
1. One thing Feedly did correctly was to make their old version available in the iTunes Store. It is called Feedly classic. So everyone who’s complaining about the update can simply download the app.
2. Give an optometrist a call. Both your day and tonight settings are not ideal for the eyes. There’s a very simple contrast and color palette you can implement that would be much better for day and night. This is one of the things I was really hoping would be fixed in the new version.Show lessCatalogue Michael
Terrible long term dedicated user
I cannot believe anyone could even like the new way that you set this up it’s awful I have been using your app since you first started I have always loved your app cannot believe that you changed it to this garbage it is complete utter garbage so glad that you still have the classic version it is very fortunate in my search for a new RSS reader I found that you had not totally give up on the old version I’m very happy and hope that you will keep old version around I don’t even see why people are even using this app it is on usable it’s worthless I do not like it at all and don’t understand why people would want you to change the best app for reading stories on the web I will definitely switch to Apple news or Flipboard before I ever use this app it is terrible Understand I very rarely ever review anything but I had to when you changed one of my go to favorite apps for years for total garbage. You should have made this a new app and seen how many ratings it got on its own to put it under all the good ratings of the old app is totally unfair I don’t understand what you guys are doing but if you continue on this path I am very scared that you’re going to go out of business when you’ve got something good why change it be like apple abandoning the iPhone for A piece of paper and a pen what you’re doing just makes absolutely no senseShow lessvery concerned long-term user
In Support of 54.0.0
I've read some of the backlash and some do have valid points. Overall I think the developers addressed the usability on the iPhone. With the screens getting larger and larger and with most folks being right handed, the UI changes make sense. They've made it a lot more usable with a single have. The UI transitions are nice. Being able to tie an article to multiple boards at once is also nice. I'd like to be able to swipe it away when I'm done though, in the same vain of making it more usable by not having to reach the top button to close it.
On the iPad I've noticed better support for the pencil where it was barely usable before. Thank you!!! I do miss the way the articles and images changed sizes and layouts when switching between landscape and portrait mode though, it felt more dynamic and engaging.
Overall I love the changes. Great job guys!!!Show lessgwakie
