Digg Reader, one of the best Google Reader replacements, comes to Android

Digg, the Betaworks-backed social news-reading site, has finally launched an app for Android after releasing an iOS app back in June.

“By far the most common user feedback over the past two months has been some variation on, ‘Where’s my freaking Android app, you lazy idiots!?’” Digg wrote today in a blog post. “Well, today the long national nightmare is over.”

The best part? The app includes Digg Reader, one of the better RSS readers to emerge after Google Reader walked the plank. Digg Reader is a bit basic, but it’s fast and clean — two things I prioritize in a news-reading app.

Digg says the new Android app includes the following features:

• Quickly swipe back and forth through Digg’s Top Stories as well as through any feed or folder in Digg Reader. Choose from either the web view or the parsed text view.

• Digg or save any story; send it to Instapaper, Pocket or Readability (automatically upon save, if you choose); and share to Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, WordPress, Buffer, Dropbox, Google Drive, e-mail, text, or any other shareable app on your device.

• Search Digg Top Stories.

• Sort your Digg Reader items by popularity to quickly see which of your items are the most talked-about on the social web.

• Log in to Digg Reader with your Google, Facebook, or Twitter account.

• Search for and add new feeds. Create, organize, and delete folders.

• If you so choose, post your diggs automatically to your Facebook timeline.

The only huge thing still missing from Digg Reader searching through your feeds for specific articles. Digg is working to add this, but search is a hard feature to put in if you’re not, say, Google. (That said, competing RSS app Feedly now offers article search, but it charges you $5 a month to use it.)

Other features this app doesn’t have include: simply viewing unread items, automatic background updating, and changing text sizes. Digg acknowledges these features are missing and will work to add them “over the next few months.”

But for now, it appears Digg just wanted a version of its app available on Android before too many more people yelled at it for not offering one.

via VentureBeat http://venturebeat.com/2013/08/29/digg-reader-one-of-the-best-google-reader-replacements-comes-to-android/