Giacomo Barbieri
Welcome to issue #7 of Homescreen. Here you can find ideas, thoughts and reasons why I choose which app deserves to stay on my phone, tablet and smartwatch.
This week, I go through the trial of the new Reeder app to substitute Readwise by Reader.
As I mentioned in issue #2, I tried a lot of read-it later apps from 2014 on. Between 2015 and 2016, I was using Reeder, an app made by fellow Italian Silvio Rizzi, and I actually used that as a feed manager for about 5 years, only migrating read-it later part to Pocket after a couple of years.
A while ago, Silvio released a new app, again called Reeder, but with a different logo - a yellow lightning bolt on a black background. Maybe the lightning is a metaphor of the lightning fast speed of the app, or the flow of information you can manage from it.
The app is beautiful: it’s fast, smooth but still familiar. It’s a unified feed of RSS feeds, YouTube channels, Mastodon and Bluesky accounts, podcasts feeds and more. The ratio behind this unification is clear: information is wrapped as a hyperlink on the internet, so it doesn’t make a difference if that link goes to a video, an audio content or a text article.
I tried Reeder, but just for a few minutes, and I immediately knew that it wasn’t right for me. That’s because Reeder tries to unify everything, but in fact it doesn’t, and that only makes things worse. Reeder wants to compete with many applications at once: Reader by Readwise, but also Podcast, Overcast or Pocket Casts for podcasts, YouTube for video and all social media and micro-blogging apps. And this intuition is very good, because links are all the same, right?
Yes, they’re the same, but the way we process them may be very different:
for articles, I want to save for later, favorite, highlight and listen using text-to-speech. Reeder lets you save for later, but also bookmark and favorite. What’s the conceptual difference? I don’t get it. And it doesn’t let you highlight and listen;
for audio, no podcast app has every feature I want, but Podcast and Pocket Casts come closer than ever: I want to follow shows and have the Up Next list full of the shows I’m following. I want to choose to remove some episodes from the Up Next if I don’t want to listen to a specific one and I also want to see yearly stats about how much I listened, which shows I listened to the most, and more. Podcasts has everything except the stats, while Pocket Casts is the most complete but is not so smooth - or at least it wasn’t until I last used it a couple years ago, I’d have to try it again to confirm;
for video, for my specific use case, I can manage just saving video for later like they’re articles, but I mostly find videos when browsing on YouTube or when I’m in other websites, so I need to be able to share the video to save it for later, and Reeder doesn’t let me do that - at least yet. And, since most apps have it now, I’d expect to have a transcript of the video so that I can highlight when watching.
So no, Reeeder is still a no, but I would very much like it to be a yes, because even though it’s subscription-based, it’s just 1€/month or 10€/year.
But my quest will continue.
Thanks for reading!
If you have ideas about new apps to try, don’t hesitate to shoot an email to hey@jaack.me
