I’ve been using the Flipboard iOS app as my daily morning news reader pretty much since I first got an iPad. It offered a nice, magazine like UI where you can flip through pages full of images and short article blurbs until you can find something you want to read.
The past couple of years and iOS versions though, the app has been performing terribly. Crashes a lot, reader view often fails to load, or flickers and reloads continuously and so on. Just not a very good experience.
I’m sure it’s not entirely their fault; recent iOS versions (starting from 13 I think?) have become more agressive with their memory management and garbage collection, so app processes seemed to regularly get killed for some reason. It sometimes happens in other apps too, but by far Flipboard is the worst offender. Maybe their code is poorly optimized, IDK. Oh, and they’ve started to have a lot more ads! In any case, I’ve had enough.
My most relevant Flipboard reading consists of:
- latest world news/headlines (main)
- tech news (secondary)
- comics/gaming news (when I just feel like scrolling through Flipboard)
For a replacement, I assumed I could simply take their most common sources in each of the above categories and import them into my RSS reader of choice (right now that’s Inoreader). But after doing that, I realized this won’t work, because I treat my mealtime news reading differently from feeds I follow via RSS. I don’t want to have unread counts for the news stuff, just see what’s the most recent stuff and move on. I decided instead to revive my Feedly account, and import the news feeds there, and use the Feedly iOS app for my morning news reading.
Have been doing this for a few days already; not all of the feeds render well (particularly some websites that did not have RSS feeds, I had to do workarounds), but it seems acceptable for now. Maybe I’ll revisit Flipboard again in a future iOS version and hope they get their stability together.
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