

Ask HN: How can we differentiate our app from Flipboard, Pulse, Reeder etc.? - seeking

Disclaimer: this is my guest account<p>We are designing an iPad app focused on subscribing, displaying and sharing news/blogs content. Since there are already some decent similar apps out in the market, how can we differentiate ours from others in terms of features (..apart from good UI, UX and execution)? We would love to hear from current iPad users: what are some of the problems that you are facing with apps such as Flipboard and Pulse? What more you would like to see that's currently missing from the existing apps?<p>Thanks in advance!
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brianwillis
The biggest problem that I have with RSS readers in general (not just on the
iPad) is that they so aggressively separate content from presentation. Design
has value, and RSS readers strip the design of a site entirely. In your app,
if you could display a cached version of the web page that the RSS feed points
to instead of the plain contents of the feed itself, you'd provide a richer
experience than your competitors.

The second biggest problem I have with RSS feeds is that some providers only
include summary information in the feed and require users to click through to
the website to view the full content. By caching the actual web page, your
users would be able to get around this restriction.

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seeking
Thanks for your reply. With regards to your first comment, do you mean caching
the entire webpage including its style, pictures (what about ads?) etc. and
displaying them in a 4:3 format? I believe Byline, Reeder and a few others
already does that.

On a side note, isn't one of the reasons people use RSS readers is because of
their preference for contents over design?

