Plenary

After waiting for so long and number of postponements, today I released Plenary on Product hunt to get feedback from fellow startup enthusiasts.

Here is the launch link:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/plenary-rss-feeds-offline-rss-reader

Launching on product hunt was next big step and I hope that Plenary reaches to more RSS users.

This is a significant milestone for me. I have listened to the users and have rolled out two most requested features by the users

1. Backup and Restore of your entire data on your preferred storage (e.g Local mobile storage, Google Drive, Dropbox). Keeping my privacy focused approach we have also an added option to protect those backups by a password so that your data is always safe, secure and residing in a storage you're comfortable with.

2. Another most requested feature was ability to mark multiple articles as read . I have added series of options to achieve this. Now users can mark category's articles or last 7 days articles as read in one go. There is also option to mark articles as read below or above certain article. This is particularly helpful when you are browsing through feed and you want to mark all the articles below or above as read at certain point.

Get the latest version from play store (https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.spians.plenary) today and give your feedback!

Focusing on Privacy, I was very clear that Plenary has to have a very useful and unique set of premium features to make it worth for premium subscribers and for me to continue Plenary's development as rapidly as I had done in 6 months prior.

I'm glad that Plenary's users also found premium feature set worth and useful as today Plenary received its 10th subscription. Again, A small but very important step in the right direction.

Adding some of the most important and unique features to Plenary saw rise in installs and Plenary finally hit the 1000 total installs mark on Google Play. A small but very important step into right direction for Plenary

Inflow of users saw rise in feature requests and feedback as well. To make it easy for the users, I embedded a form in the app itself to give feedback and request new features ( Considering Plenary's focus on privacy, It goes without saying that it's an Anonymous form)

The day I announced my app on one of the most popular sub Reddits for new Android apps (https://www.reddit.com/r/androidapps/comments/fpgcjl/dev_introducing_plenary_rss_feeds_and_offline/).

Response was warm and feedback was great. Appreciation was comforting and feature requests were encouraging. Was never more assured about the path that I wanted to take and the direction I wanted to follow for Plenary.

By the time the first beta was released, I already had the next set of features that I wanted to address as soon as possible. In the next 10 weeks, I made 6 releases. Each and every release had some important new features in it. Plenary was heading exactly where I wanted it to be. Here are some of the features that were released in this series of releases

● Quick search functionality to quickly search articles from specific feeds or domains

● RSS Assistant: New way to create RSS feeds from most popular websites such as YouTube, Reddit, Medium, WordPress, Pinterest etc in just few clicks. One can even import personal feeds from these websites directly in the app.

● Linking to external apps: Opening feeds articles directly in relevant apps. e.g User can directly open YouTube feed article in native YouTube app for seamless experience.

● Tags for offline articles : Ability to add tags to saved articles and view them in categorized view!

● Global RSS feeds search: A place where you can just type a term and get feeds related to that from various sources (Offline and Online)

It took over 3 months but I had finally the first beta version ready. It was quite a journey for those 3 months. I wanted to make sure that the initial version had a rich feature set to make sure that early adopters don't miss some of the important features in other RSS aggregators. It was a bumpy ride with all my nights and weekends getting marked as RSS research days but I released first beta version with following features

● 👍 Recommended Feeds : 400 top RSS feeds curated by me in 30+ popular categories i.e. Business, Finance, Food, Gaming, History, Movies, Music, News, Programming, Sports, Technology & TV

● 📶 Full offline support : Feeds will be synced at your preferred interval if you are connected to the internet & you can access them anywhere offline. Ability to save the entire content of an article by tapping the save button to use the app as an offline news reader.

● 🔇 No Ads/Trackers: Absolutely zero tracking of user actions. Everything the app does, from fetching feeds to aggregating them and saving them is done on the device. All the data of feeds & downloaded articles is stored in the local storage.

● 🎨 Multiple themes: Choose from three base themes - light, dark & sepia and ability to change accent color from available options

● 🔄 Auto sync feeds: Option to auto sync feeds at regular intervals with multiple choices available ranging from 15 minutes to 1 day

● 💬 TTS(Text To Speech): Listen to a feed article or saved article using text to speech.

● Other features included full OPML support, Search feeds online through Feedly API, categories of feed & fully customizable reader experience (font, text size, themes etc)

I was casually discussing the RSS feed of one of the popular news sites with one of my friends. I added that feed in the aggregator I was using back then. I was going to catch a flight that night and I thought I'd save the entire feed offline so that I can catch up during my flight. Well that's when I realized there is no way I could do that. Seeds of Plenary were planted in my mind on that day.