supaReada

A few weeks ago I shared this moodboard and said my boyfriend and I were working on our first app. Well, it launched a few days ago and I can actually tell you more about it now! It is called supaReada and…..it’s a feed reader!

Earlier in 2013 when Google Reader shut down we were joking around about how many feed readers would start popping up everywhere and how feedly and bloglovin better be on the top of their game! And shortly after…we decided to tackle it ourselves. Instead of going ahead and copying existing feed readers we went back to basics and thought about how we use feed readers, what settings we like, which options we actually use etc. Big fans of simplicity we decided on our priorities for the app: simple, fast and easy to use with a few flexible options to choose from.

You may notice that the moodboard I shared a few weeks ago doesn’t fully represent supaReada anymore. This project was a good example of how things can change as you are working on them. Just because you have a certain vision in the beginning doesn’t mean it is the best one to follow through with. Although the logo as it is now was developed quite early on the icons and colours changes numerous times. In the end we came back to our core principal for app, simplicity, and scaled back the colour wheel.

Since it is just a two person team working on this there is no desktop version of the app and, at least for the time being, it is only available for android phones. I like to think of it as the perfect app for the on-the-go person who occasionally follows a few feeds while commuting via public transit.

Have you noticed how many apps now ask for your permission to access like 10 different random things on your phone, including private things such as your call history? That ain’t cool. With security and privacy becoming a bigger concern for people we made sure that supaReada is as uninvasive as possible. You don’t need to make an account and the only permissions required are internet access (to fetch blogs) and phone store permission (to store your feed).

Although we love simplicity we are also fans of customizing. We added a few settings you can play with, such as show/hide images, show/hide timestamp, shortened vs full excepts and on/off auto-refresh on start-up. Additional useful features include copy Url, sharing via social media, viewing post in browser, easily add/delete feeds and import your feed list (OPML). We also offer the app in english, german, serbian and croatian. It’s a little obscure but we want to make it accessible to everyone, even non-english speaking folk and are hoping to further grow the language library.

We want this app to be as awesome and useful as possible. We’d super appericiate it if you downloaded the app and gave it a spin. While we are not actually supa-heros we would love to hear your opinion, suggestions, feedback or issues and see how we can improve your experience.

You can download the app in the playstore here.

Happy reading :)