
Show HN: Plenary – A privacy focused RSS feed and offline reader app for Android - spians
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spians.plenary
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spians
Hey HN,

We've created an RSS feed and offline reader app for android that doesn't show
ads/track your activity. The app is a combination of a feature rich RSS
reader, minimalist podcast player and an offline article downloader (similar
to read it later apps). The app has novel ways to add RSS feeds and has an
offline first strategy.

Please try out the app and let us know if you have any questions or what you'd
like to see in coming versions!

~~~
binarysneaker
Freely/Palabre/Flipboard user, and long time feed consumer. I've used Plenary
for about an hour, some thoughts...

1\. Needs an option to use Firefox as the browser, rather than using Chrome.
And an option to open externally or a within the app. 2\. Needs an option for
the article title link to take me straight to the article. Yep, I could click
the link icon, but it's a smaller area and clicking the title is intuitive.
3\. When there's no thumbnail, the large placeholder with two letters and a
garish background colour feels like wasted space. Either remove the
placeholder, or improve the algorithm to insert an image. 4\. A zoom slider
for the front page grid would be nice. On a tablet there's plenty of layout
optimization that could be done. 5\. Duplicate link removal, and across
different sites/domains/social networks 6\. Some trend analysis to determine
what's most important to read out of thousands of articles daily

Overall, it's already better than most of the existing feed readers out there
IMO. But if you want my money, you gotta have every one of those feature
enhancements checked.

~~~
spians
Hi,

Thank you for trying out Plenary.

1\. Plenary doesn't use Chrome as the browser (it uses Android WebView that
uses chrome engine internally). We didn't go with custom tabs as we wanted
more control on the interactions with WebView. You can open links externally
or within the app (If you have premium, you can open your preferred domain
urls externally as the main action).

2\. Are you talking about opening article externally as the main action?

3\. Sure we will improve the algorithm to find the image and also look into
removing the placeholder if image is not present.

4\. It would be great if you can elaborate more on "zoom slider for the front
page grid". Yes, Plenary is currently not fully optimized for tablet
experience. That is one area we need to work more on.

5\. Because of the way Plenary is designed, everything it does; from fetching,
combining and storing feed data to showing it to the user; is done on your
mobile device. Catching duplicate content links is hard to implement in this
case because that logic will also have to reside on the user device.

6\. Same as point 5. Trend analysis is not possible because everything is done
on your device. We don't have any server to store any user data.

Thanks again for your detailed feedback. Really appreciate it.

------
llarsson
What's the in-app purchase one can make, according to the Play store?

Also, just noting that Feeder is open source and pretty good. Does not play
podcasts, but I have AntennaPod for that.

~~~
spians
You can purchase Plenary premium to support the app development. Premium will
give unlock many features such as

\- Pure black theme

\- Automatic cloud backups

\- Ability to directly open specific links in another app

\- Unlimited feeds

\- Quick actions in notifications

\- Internal YouTube player

\- More accent colors

\- More fonts for reader screens

You can be get premium features by purchasing Plenary lifetime premium or
subscribing to any of the subscription plans (monthly, quarterly or yearly)

