The Future of NewsRob

If you are not interested in this meta stuff you can go directly to the release notes of NewsRob 3.6 here.

Recently NewsRob turned one and also crossed the 100.000 downloads barrier. Yay!

I took this event to think about the future of NewsRob.

In retrospect I really liked the last 14 months working on NewsRob and interacting with you guys. Those months took a heavy toll on my work/life balance and my social life, but in the end there was much more good than bad. I can't make any promises, but so far I decided to keep on going with NewsRob.

There is one change though. From the future on there will be two versions of NewsRob: A free version and a paid version.

The free version will feature ads, but will have the exact same functionality as NewsRob has now. I will also continue to add new features to the free version.

NewsRob Pro, the paid version, will have no ads and features some exclusive functionality. In the future I will decide for each new feature to which version I want to add it. As the paid version is focused on the power users it will likely be features geared towards this group.

Maybe some of the exclusive functionality will also turn up in the free version later.

The price for NewsRob Pro is €4.99 (~USD 7, GBP 4.35) and is bought as a separate application from the Android Market. It unlocks the premium features in NewsRob. You can buy from within NewsRob from the options menu "Buy NewsRob Pro".

As a token of appreciation to the existing NewsRob users the price will be €3.99 for a week.

We are discussing this approach on the NewsRob mailing list. If you want to give constructive feedback and talk with other users too, join us there. If you want to vent you can leave a comment here at the blog and if you want to give me a piece of your mind or leave a death threat you can also email me: mariano.kamp@gmail.com.

I hope you guys are happy with the new direction and give me feedback one way or another.

Authentication

In the recent past there have been a couple of changes regarding signing in to NewsRob/Google Reader. Judging by the feedback and a couple of thousands uninstalls this is a matter very close to the heart of many NewsRob users. So let me give you some background and a glimpse in the future.

Since very recently NewsRob/Google Reader sessions didn't expire for 3rd party apps. Now the expiration is two weeks. The introduction of this new policy was accompanied by an expiration of all sessions, so that you guys had to re-login.

Also recently another change in Google Reader broke the 3rd party apps. The Google Reader team very quickly rolled back the change, but many of you were affected. You needed to login again. Sorry for that.

There is an upside of the changes though, but more one that later.

On top of that NewsRob's login functionality wasn't as resilient as one would expect. As the sessions never timed out I felt that my time were better spent on other features. Well, live and learn ;-)

Meanwhile the current V3.5.3 handles expired sessions as it should have right from the beginning. This weekend I will release V3.6. This version will also handle CAPTCHAs and allow you to optionally save your password, so that NewsRob can auto-login you when the session expires.

Now to the upside I mentioned above. Some initial testing indicates that one of the recently deployed Google Reader changes now makes the Google Reader authorization compatible with the Android 2.0 Account/Authentication API.

That means, if everything works as expected, NewsRob 3.7 will not need to ask your for your Google account's password again. Instead there is an official way where your password is kept safe and you will only be asked to authorize NewsRob to access Google services using your account. Let me repeat that, the password itself will no longer to be disclosed to NewsRob.

You're probably as happy about that as I am ;-)

It's hard to say at the moment, but I expect NewsRob 3.7 to be out mid March.

Keep And Sync: Unread Articles Only

Update: This sync option is working now and not considered experimental anymore.

With NewsRob 3.4.0 a new sync option was introduced:

Keep And Sync: Unread Articles Only (Experimental)

Please don't use that feature anymore. For some users it lead to articles marked as read, that weren't read. I don't know yet, what the problem is, but I'll put an update onto this post when I know more.

This conversation contains more details and I will keep it updated.

Please test NewsRob 3.4

NewsRob 3.4 is coming out soon and I would like you to test it.

Among other things it adds a sync option: "Keep and Sync Unread Articles Only", which only fetches unread articles from Google Reader. It also deletes read articles on your phone during the next sync to make room for older unread articles in your Google Reader account.

A couple of people have already been testing it, but I would like to get some more test exposure for this feature.

So please have a look at this discussion, download the beta linked there and feed back into the discussion if it works for you or if something is broken.

There are also other new features in this release. You can find details in the discussion from above.

Vote for your favorite feature at uservoice

Hi,

I am trying out uservoice. You can add feature requests there and vote on them.

Check it out. You can also access it from the "feedback" tab on the left.

We'll see how well this goes. If it works for us, we'll keep it.

Fifty Thousands Downloads

Update: As a response to user feedback from the next version on NewsRob will not collect any stats anymore for the time being.

*If* I will turn it back on I will do so in a *loud* way and will ask the users for feedback *first*.

I am very happy to announce that NewsRob now has been downloaded more than 50,000 times from the Android Market. Thank you!

I have been frequently asked about different stats on NewsRob. I think this is a good time to share some data.

NewsRob was published to the Android Market in the mid of January 2009, but I just started tracking the number of active users in May 2009. So here are the active users since then:

The ups are when a new version was published, except for the last one, that was the introduction of the Droid. The downs are the weekends.

Active users are unique users on that particular day, think visitors. Passive NewsRob installations that just sync, but the NewsRob UI was not launched, are not taken into account.

This is the geo distribution of NewsRob users:

Interestingly Spain is the single largest NewsRob user base in Europe. Muchas gracias.

The top four European countries combined are about the same population as the US alone, but that wasn't surprising ;-)

I personally find the following interesting:

The average time of a NewsRob session is 20 minutes and on average the NewsRob GUI is launched three times a day by a user.

When taking the number of users of a single day, say 8,000, multiply it by the number of sessions, say three, and by the average session length, you'll get 8,000*3*20/60/24 = 333 days of usage per calendar day.

If you continue that example you'll get to 25 years of usage for November, or 19 year for October as seen above. Pretty cool I would say. It far out weights the time I spent working on NewsRob.

Last not least here are some technical parameters you may find interesting:

Roughly every 5th NewsRob user runs cyanogenmod:

In case you are curious, this data is provided by flurry.

Bonus: Walking Down Memory Lane

Ok, you made it until here, so there is a special treat for you. Tim Suh posted a video of NewsRob nine months ago on YouTube. I think it's interesting to see that today. There are still some elements left that are in today's version of NewsRob.

NOTE: THIS IS NOT THE CURRENT VERSION OF NEWSROB.

Droid takes the world by storm?

I read a couple of times now that the Motorola Droid is selling like hot cake. On the first weekend 100,000 devices might have been sold?!

The NewsRob users may not be representative, but looking at the numbers it seems that every tenth NewsRob user is now a Droid user.

The numbers are from yesterday. Look at the percentages:

I am waiting for the Droid myself, but it will take another couple of days until it is available in Europe as Motorola Milestone.

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