Feedly, the world's largest independent RSS reader, has experienced technical problems for over a week. Users paying for the service have reported that the web application is "unusably slow", and some have indicated that the company has ignored their technical support requests.
Feedly, which inherited the market left behind by Google when it shut down Google Reader in 2013, is today one of the most successful RSS news readers globally with 15 million users, according to its website. This makes it larger than competing products such as Inoreader online, as well as several desktop applications such as NetNewsWire and Reeder.
However, the application is experiencing several ongoing problems that affect users and paid subscribers. The most critical issue is significant slowdown in its web application. Users reported on Reddit that the application was running "extremely" slowly, making it "unusable". Additionally, users said that Feedly's iOS application has not been working, and the classic version of the mobile application was shut down without warning weeks ago.
TechCrunch contacted Feedly for information about these problems, as multiple customers on Reddit said their technical support requests had been ignored. Feedly CEO Edwin Khodabakchian assured TechCrunch that RSS remained a focus. "Despite the shift towards cyber threat intelligence, fixing basic RSS functionality remains a priority because our CTI community uses the news reading capability," he said. The front-end team had been testing a solution, and the company attributed the problem to a glitch related to the "Mark as read" feature on accounts with many folders. A fix was released on Friday.
Khodabakchian also confirmed that the Feedly Classic application was "withdrawn two weeks ago because it no longer met some iOS and Android requirements", although it had been removed from the App Store much earlier. At that time, the application had only a few hundred active users, he noted. The team did not notify existing users before the final shutdown. Regarding the iOS application problems, Khodabakchian said he was not aware of them, but assured that Feedly would investigate and promised it would be fixed quickly, noting that the company continues to actively invest in its main iOS and Android application.