Bulletin - AI RSS News

I love the idea behind this app. The care and attention to the UX is clear. Appreciate push notifications, iCloud syncing, and the full Apple ecosystem support. If you want a basic “already configured”news/RSS app, Bulletin fits the bill. Which leads to what’s missing… It’s missing some critical things for long-time RSS users though: * Yes, you can import in your own OPML feeds, but organizing them and essentially wiping the slate clean to just bring my familiar feeds in my own organization style…that’s a daunting process. So much so, that I gave up for now. * It doesn’t appear to offer options to use Postlight or Readability to parse/extract articles from feeds that only provide headlines, but admittedly I only tested a couple of feeds with this. * Customizing notifications in a more granular way by feed, number of topics, or keywords would be a lovely addition. * Hierarchical sorting beyond a single category. * Customizing the sidebar area. This is an opinionated app…I love that about it. It’s just not quite my aesthetic. Longtime users of Reeder or News Explorer are going to enjoy the UX, long for the AI summarization features that come natively here, but struggle to embrace a paradigm that wants you to do things the Bulletin way instead of the way you’ve become accustomed to in other RSS apps. That’s not a bad thing, but I do long for significantly more customization features in feed organization, hierarchy, parsing, update times, and a “just start from a clean slate and import my stuff and don’t add anything to it” option. I’d happily spend money on this app if it evolves in that direction. For now…I will envy some of the summarization features but go back to my trusted long-time RSS apps.

“A new notification has been posted” is not the type of notification I want went a new article gets posted, why can’t it show the title and the content of the posts like other rss apps?

So tired of text-centric apps such as this where all you do is read text and yet there is NO WAY to change the font size of the article text, even using iOS app-specific font size feature. What is the deal with these devs? It’s like making a car without the ability to adjust the seats. Unbelievable. Navigation from the tiny text article view is horrible. No way to swipe to next article or even dismiss the pop-up view. No easy way to mark articles as read. No mark read on scroll. This is just horrible… go check out other apps like Inoreader or Readkit and copy their main reading features. Then build off of that with your AI. Add more voice options. The default iOS voice is unbearable. Also your price is too high for what this offers. I like the idea of this which is why I care to leave such a review and it’s a great start to something amazing. It is just unusable… for me. Main gripes are above. Fix the problems and I’ll change this to a glowing 5 star review. UPDATE TO YOUR RESPONSE: No, you can’t. It does not change article font size which was my point.

The summaries are worthless. Other than than the app feels like one of many sub par news aggregators.

Great concept but in my usage I notice a lot of slow updates and/or the app appears to hang on a blank screen.

Pros: Beautiful Lovely to look at Easy to read feeds Cons Limited font options Cannot customize main tabs (News, Technology, etc) Hard to move feeds into main tabs if you import your feed Load times are slow Imported feeds show up as one tab called “Imported” it regards your categories inside the feed file ***** No bulk editing

Way too frustrating to try and use. Developer needs to spend more time on this before thinking of charging money.

No Inoreader/Feedly sync Everything in the UI is just too big. Looks like it was designed for the elderly. Not enough information density. Useless button on the bottom to scroll down when you can just scroll. AI button on the main page is summarizing the top article, not the feed. Super weird to have that button there. Turn off categories disables them, but it looks weird because it doesn’t toggle off all the feeds under them as you would expect. Feels very half-baked. Might revisit in in a year, but it’s just a first draft of an app right now.

But not for this app

I have the iOS app (which has its own set of issues) but so does the macOS app. I have iCloud Sync enabled, yet it didn't sync any of my subscriptions from iOS. Why is the settings panel so tiny? Open the tiny settings panel, then click "Go to settings" and there's no way to exit this Siri prompt. I had to force close the app. No font size options. Horrible UI. No way to resize panels. It's like the dev slapped this together and hoped for the best. Stop trying to support every known Apple device and focus on one (iOS) and try to make it usable please. This is just unusable.