Would only be interesting with Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, etc. support. ToS prevent that, so no business would attempt that integration. However, that doesn't mean it can't be done. I look forward to (and might write my own) agent to "read" Twitter, Instagram, etc. and put them into a user friendly and ad-free format.
Interestingly, there was some early work in the timeframe of Android Ice Cream Sandwich (4.x) to create unified social media stream, something that AFAIK was also done with specialized apps on some BlackBerry Android based device IIRC.
Didn't go anywhere, probably because of ad revenue needs.
I remember this as more of a Windows Phone thing. From looking at screenshots, the People screen had a What's New tab that may be what I'm remembering. I believe that was intended to pull in latest posts across social media for all contacts.
I backed this on Kickstarter mostly out of long time nostalgia for the Iconfactory as a Mac user in the 90s. It’s really nicely designed but I don’t see it replacing Inoreader for my feed consumption.
A typical playbook of many iOS and macOS apps: crippled free version as a vehicle for subscriptions, with an extremely expensive lifetime offering that takes a decade to break even (very few apps make over a decade, a lot many just change the TOS to pretend lifetime plan did not exist in the first place after a few years of offering them).
On the first blush, there’s a hint of promise. I like that I can add both plain RSS and podcasts (have yet to find an RSS reader that handles podcast feeds seamlessly). Many other players (Reeder [1] and Surf [2]) are attempting to tackle similar usecase.
Well... you can just subscribe for a month, cancel it immediately, and try it for month
The thing that annoys me more is the Apple dependency/tax ; i'd rather pay the Developer directly, in cases where they offer this on their own website (i always check.)
In my day, the IDE/compiler weren't free (~50% the price of a new computer), the OS wasn't free (~10% the price of a computer, for each update), account handling was such a mess for everyone that I bought software with an actual chequebook and when I cashed in my Kagi* account they sent me an actual cheque too, and the only way to do subscriptions was a direct debit that wouldn't work in every country. Also lots of American companies wouldn't sell me software directly, I had to get friends willing to do the transaction for me and give them money for it.
I'm not saying Apple is entirely fair or well priced (although they were back when the App Store was new, the world changed around them) but I am saying you'll save a lot less than you're expecting to when you do all this stuff yourself — and I'm speaking as one who has.
Keeping track of 190 different sales tax rates is, even by itself, not fun. Best to offload what you can — same reason loads of business go to "the cloud", use site builders or wordpress, or contract out to third-party payroll services.
* payment processor, not search engine; same domain, otherwise completely unrelated.
It's clear that app and game developers don't want Apple's App Store to charge the same kind of platform fees that Google Play or the Nintendo eShop charge.
I found Tapestry through a Verge article, but had many of the complaints echoed elsewhere here. The same article mentioned Feeeed (iOS only - https://apps.apple.com/us/app/feeeed-rss-reader-and-more/id1...). It's similar in spirit but I found it much more tailored to reading. There are several killer features for me:
1. First off, it defaults to a pretty good reader mode
2. Next, you can easily switch to an embedded browser view if automatic reader fails
3. Even better, your preference persists per-site, so you don't have to keep switching if the reader is broken for some reason
4. Feature I've not found anywhere else - the automatic reader mode appears to use the same session cookies etc. as the browser view. So you can actually get reader mode for sites that need a login.
5. Finally, the browser view applies automatic dark mode
Main thing that's missing is a mark-as-read-on-scroll.
Lastly, it's completely free! Author seems to just want to make a good reader app. I can't even find a tip jar link in the app.
I don’t think that’s possible. Modern advertisers require those sweet sweet metrics, which can never be truly anonymized, and in most cases attempts to anonymize are half-hearted at best.
I'm less interested in the ads being private as I am in there being no ads at all. Ads are a deal breaker. Maybe they have a paid ad-free tier? I don't want to have to install it to find out.
There was an app called Tapestry by Betaworks, inspired by Robin Sloan's idea of a tap essay, that I absolutely loved and wish it would come back.
> "I saw it, and I loved it so much,” Borthwick said. “It felt like an intimate and immersive form of reading on the phone. I thought, could you not make a platform to publish more of these?”
Still haven't found anything close to it and social media stories don't seem to match up.
One thing all these "all in one apps" get wrong is this: while I do want to consume multiple services in one app, I definitely do not want to consume them in a single unified timeline.
Mail clients have run into the same issue several years ago and still doggedly try to make "unified inbox" happen.
Windows Phone 7 had a genuinely unique twist on the unified inbox.
The operating system deprioritized apps with their own feeds, and instead provided a number of "hubs" that were like topical inboxes that collected data from multiple APIs.
There was a People hub that showed your contacts aggregated across phone contact book, Windows Live, Facebook, Gmail, Twitter... Notifications about people you know would show up in this screen regardless of the service. And there was a Photos hub that similarly showed photos from everywhere: local, Facebook, etc.
It was a truly original idea for a social media oriented phone. But companies like Facebook and Twitter were not too happy about the idea of being API pipes with little or no control over the user interface on the user's phone. Of course they had some good reasons not to trust Microsoft on this, given Microsoft's past behavior. I think FB shut down the necessary APIs completely a few years later and replaced them with more limited options.
Are there any "all in one apps" like this? That's the first one I ever saw. I've been wondering for years now, why ain't anyone trying it.
The unified timeline is the whole point. However, for me, this app gets two things wrong:
1) I'd also want IM feeds on the same timeline. Like, Messenger, Teams, WhatsApp, etc. I know it's probably impossible due to how obstructionist and anti-user the chat vendors are, but I keep dreaming about it. Most chat conversations are, in my mind, in the same general category as HN links or incoming e-mail: "thing that I need to pay a minute of attention up front, and then possibly 15+ minutes dealing with".
We created the most popular (at the time) “all in one” app for macOS back in 2008 called EventBox [1].
It aggregated RSS, Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Reddit.
So it’s a very old idea that’s just coming back - like a lot of things, it goes in cycles.
We ended up selling the software to another company. My personal advice - never build your business on top of other companies data/APIs, they can cut you off at any point.
exactly. having an unified inbox makes me feel like losing context. i dont want to keep checking which message is this, where is this coming from, how should i reply, etc....
I mean... the unified timeline is literally the number one feature this app advertises. If you find that doesn't work for you, their product vision just doesn't align with your preferences. What's the point of even engaging if you know they don't build what you want on such a fundamental level?
