An Otter RSS Reader
The world’s okayest RSS reader
Free (IAPs) From Josh Holtz, anotterrss.com
Made for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch Needs iOS 14.0 or later
Developer Josh Holtz wanted An Otter RSS Reader to be the world’s “most okayest RSS reader.” We think he’s managed it.
An Otter is not designed for power users and doesn’t have many features. It’s a simple, friendly and straightforward feed reading app that sets out to do not very much and to do it quite well.
If you’re currently running NetNewsWire or Reeder with tons of feeds, this is most definitely not the RSS app for you — while you can import feeds in OPML format from other apps you can’t use this app as a front–end for your favorite sync service such as Feedly.
We think An Otter is best suited to people who are new to the whole RSS thing. Its impressive auto–discovery feature enables you to enter a website address and let it find the
feeds, and it works well on sites such as MacRumors or popular Apple blogger Daring Fireball; we found it a bit more unpredictable with some individual blogs. Once it’s found the feeds you can choose whether you want to subscribe, and you can organize your feeds into folders for easy access. The app syncs over iCloud to keep your iPhone and iPad in sync.
The biggest problem with An Otter RSS Reader isn’t that it lacks power features, it’s that it doesn’t include a dedicated reading module. For each article it links directly to the website and displays it as the original web page with the option to switch into Safari’s Reading View.
That’s good news for the website owners, but it’s not great news for us because it removes some of the things we like best about RSS readers. It means we can’t refresh our feed before going on the subway to read when we don’t have an internet connection, and it means we don’t get the consistent reading experience you get when you move from feed to feed in more powerful RSS apps. It also means that until you tap the reading view icon you’ll be exposed to the online irritants that make RSS so attractive by comparison: bad page design, intrusive advertising, and text that’s hard to read. As Holtz says, “There are plenty of other apps out there and this might not be the one for you!” It’s not the one for us, but it’s a friendly app for RSS beginners. It’s… okay. Mission accomplished.
THE BOTTOM LINE. An Otter doesn’t do much but does it quite well. CARRIE MARSHALL
AN OTTER RSS READER
Great auto–discovery
Beginner–friendly
No integrated reader
No offline reading
SOLID