Feedly for Android

Earlier this week I walked you through the process of migrating to Feedly from Google Reader.

It’s a remarkably simple process to migrate. You could say it’s as easy as 1, 2, 3. Install Feedly, click a button and grant permission for Feedly to access your Google Reader feeds and enjoy your reading. There’s nothing more to it.

While I’ve been making brilliant use of Feedly on my desktop I have to admit that I’ve still been using Google Reader on my tablet. Yesterday that changed and I made the jump to Feedly for Android.

What’s so Good about Feedly?

Feedly excels on desktop. It organizes your feeds into a magazine like layout, which makes scanning it a breeze. It integrates with your social networks to show you what your friends are sharing. It makes good use of the plentiful supply of images that your feeds include to make the whole experience highly engaging. On top of all of that there’s the single sign-on migration from Google Reader.

It’s exactly what I want from a feed reader when I’m sitting at my laptop.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari all have dedicated plugins to use Feedly on your desktop.

What makes a Good Mobile Feed Reader?

When it comes to using a feed reader on my tablet I want an entirely different experience. It has to be lean and uncluttered, give easy social sharing capabilities and it needs to show me all of today’s updates as quickly as possible. It’s a bonus if it also looks nice but, for me, when it comes to mobile - functionality trumps beauty every time.

Feedly is available on iOS and Android.

Feedly for Android

Feedly on Android looks and works very much like it does on desktop. Just login with your Google Account and your feeds are all listed.

It uses a magazine layout with plenty of images and organizes things into large, touch-friendly, panels for you to click and open for reading. It has plenty of sharing functionality built right into the app but as it’s Android you have access to the default share options – the same as you do in other apps.

Quick tip: If your like me and do any social media management then you might want to share articles from Feedly though the Hootsuite app and auto-schedule when you share it .

Navigating Feedly on Android

It’s a beautifully designed app and has a lovely pastel color scheme but one thing that I just couldn’t get used to was flipping the pages upwards.

The app tells you which way to swipe to get to the next page but swiping up just didn’t feel right. Luckily there’s multiple options on which way to reach the next page and all I had to do was change it to swipe sideways and it felt much better.

There’s a pull menu located on the left of the screen which you can open and see your categories and how many unread items are in each. Each one even folds out to show how many unread items each feed contains. You just click on it to go to the category/feed page.

Readability of Feedly for Android

Generally everything in Feedly for Android is clean and easy to read.

After a few seconds of navigating your feeds changes are that you’ll see a few that you want to read. You just need to click the panel and it will open up the article. How readable the articles are is one of the most important things of using any feed reader. If you want to make the web more readable in general then feel free to try out some readability plugins and addons.

When the entry opens you’ll be shown the featured image at the top, if there was one, followed by social shares, feed name and author. Then the rest of the entry content.

In general the readability of the text is pretty high and if you don’t like the standard Helvetica font then you can easily switch it in the menu. Similarly you can switch between night and day themes with black bg – white text and white bg – black text respectively. In darker areas the night theme will be really helpful.

One thing I felt a little strange was the fact that in portrait mode the articles expand the full width of the screen but in landscape mode they are the same width – it doesn’t stretch at all!

Homescreen Widgets offered by Feedly

There are 2 widgets offered by Feedly. 3×2 and 3×1. The larger size can be resized in height, but not width.

The widgets adopt the pastel colors and featured images that are shown within the app so they look nice sitting on your homescreen.

3 Feedly widgets aligned next to each other. Theres a 3x2 widget and two 3x1 widgets here.

I have to say that although these widgets look much better than the ones provided by Google’s Reader app they aren’t quite as functional as the ones I used to have for Reader. Reader showed a list of entry titles which I could click and read, while I can still click and read entries using the Feedly widgets they only show 1 entry at a time and you need to scroll through to see the rest of them.

I wish there was a more general list type widget offered by the Feedly for Android app.

Wrapping Up

While Feedly is an amazing desktop feed reader it still has a little way to go till it provides the same level of user experience to its mobile users. That being said that using the mobile app in conjunction with your browser version works brilliantly – however until the day when Google finally closes down Reader I’ll probably keep using it on my tablet.

Feedly for Android is, without doubt, an excellent addition to the Feedly family. Using it alongside the browser app is a perfect combination but they need to work a little on the UX of the app for me to use it as my main mobile feed reader. I expect Feedly to end up as one of my top 10 Android Apps for tech lovers in no time at all.