How is Elytra different from other services

Elytra’s biggest difference comes from its core values which I have written about here. Some of the biggest differences between some of the leading RSS Aggregators and Elytra:

  • The iOS App is built using only Native UI Elements. I have gone to great lengths to avoid the use of Web Views anywhere in Article Reader. Infact, the only place I do use a Web View is to show the Attributions and Licenses. This makes the iOS App a much better candidate for users looking for accessibility features in the RSS Feed Reader.

  • I personally rely on some of iOS’ Accessibility features so Accessibility they will always be a priority.

  • Elytra supports responsive images when a blog source provides them and goes a step further to use the correct option based on your Bandwidth, Image Size and Image Loading preferences. Only want to load images when you’re on Wi-Fi? Or want to load only low-resolution images? Elytra has settings for all of that.

  • Elytra loads images lazily, which means that if you haven’t scrolled to the point where the image will begin to appear on your screen, a network request to that image will not be made. This not only preserves bandwidth, but also power which is especially critical on battery powered devices like iPhones, Tablets and Laptops.

  • Elytra is the only RSS Feed Reader which enables to read articles from a specific author in a publisher’s feed.

  • Elytra recommends up to 9 RSS Feeds every hour based on what users are reading across the globe. All of this is done without building any sort of algorithm to promote a specific feed over the other, advertising or commercial interest.

  • Elytra is a paid service. There is a 14-day trial for you to explore the apps and see if they like them. When you do, you can signup for a monthly or yearly subscription on the Web App which auto-renews or the non-auto-renewing options in the iOS App. This means I have no motivation to inorganically scale the service or add obstructive features.

  • Elytra offers Real-Time Push Notifications from feeds that support the WebSub protocol or send RPC-Pings to Elytra’s API. Push Notifications are supported in both the iOS and Web Apps.