Bulletin - AI RSS News

Love the idea of summarized articles but this is missing a few important beats that I hope they improve on. 1) no way to indicate like / dislike articles in For You to help fine tune the list ongoing 2) no way to feedback on length, completeness of summaries. Many are too brief and miss key points relevant for a summary, making reading the full article much more necessary and defeating the app’s purpose.

Ability to customize is great; feed level and article level summaries are well done and quick.

Now the app just freezes on start up. When I disable all network connectivity, it freezes again even after a cache reset.

The stories are not curated at all. You’d have to do a lot of work to make it yours.

It automatically becomes the default handler for .ics files so Calendar events don’t open in the correct app.

I’m not a big fan of how the feeds are displayed in the boxed squares. It seems like the developers could use some modern design skills to improve the app’s appearance.

The app works great on iPhone, but the TV app is in a perpetual state of loading… Please fix! Thank you

Update: I tried the free trial period and have determined that the AI summaries are very poor. They don’t summarize the main point of the article. It merely summarizes the beginning of articles which often do not get to the main point of the article in the first few paragraphs. The iPad still has the same horrendous UI with no customization in the app. —— I continually do not understand why RSS apps don’t use the full iPad screen in portrait orientation for reading articles. It should at least be an option to hide the sidebar. This issue alone makes it a hard pass from me. This app looks good at first, but after just a few minutes you realize how restrictive it is. It doesn’t allow you to hide categories and you can’t customize feeds beyond hiding them. It also doesn’t allow adding any feeds either as far as I can tell. And a personal nitpick of mine: I much prefer opening articles in Safari Reader view by default. It's a better UX in my opinion and provides consistency across the OS. It should at least be offered as option as some other apps do.

Love the interface. The next toggle is really noice. A lot of sources. The AI summary is a cool feature. Great job!!

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.