This review originally appeared within iLounge’s iOS Gems series within the compilation article, iPhone Gems: Every RSS Reader, Reviewed. Additional details may be found in the original article.
SimpleRSS (Free) is, unsurprisingly, an extremely simple reader application that is capable of handling only one feed at a time. SimpleRSS has no refresh button, so after we changed the lone feed to iLounge from the default (manually, as there is no feed auto-detection), we (thought) we had to go back to the home screen to see our changes.
Unfortunately, we were unable to get the app to launch at all after changing the feed URL to iLounge’s feed because we had forgotten to include “http://”; each time this happened, we were forced to delete and then reinstall the application. We were finally able to load a different feed, but this experience served to make it even more obvious that reader apps should include an auto-detect feature. Once the feed is loaded, there is no indication if an item is read or unread, and tapping on an entry simply opens it in the app’s built-in browser, instead of showing the summary first.
There is no way to sync feeds, no way to flag items for later reading, and no offline capability. SimpleRSS is free, but with the inability to read multiple feeds and the lack of many common features, it isn’t a worthwhile app, and falls short of even our lowest recommendation. iLounge Rating: D.
Our Rating
Company and Price
Company: Steve Polyak
Website: N/A
Title: SimpleRSS
Price: Free
Compatible: iPhones, iPod touches
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