Bulletin: AI News Reader

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.

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.

Ever since the amount of articles have been increased in conjunction with the smart summaries feature, I’ve really come to appreciate how well this app filled the void left by Artifact. Mobile version is excellent - feature rich and full of useful gestures. It needs a history section to keep track of articles I’ve clicked on. Sometimes I need to pick up where I left off! Apple Vision Pro is currently not a good experience. Whenever I’m scrolling, it will randomly jump me back to the top of the feed! Or sometimes when I'm scrolling through the feed, I will accidentally select the scroll wheel and fling my feed around. The scrolling needs to be looked into. I think there needs to be more space between controls so they don’t accidentally get selected. Anyway mostly positive experience, just needs some refinement on AVP.