Hi friends,
Its been a crazy week with covid-19 and lockdowns all over the world. PipFeed and all its employees work remotely already so we are not that badly affected. We pray for everyone’s safety and health. Hopefully, this episode of Black Mirror will be over very very soon.
I just wanted to give you all the updates on what is new and what is planned for PipFeed. But before that, I want to thank you all for helping us build PipFeed. Without awesome readers like you, PipFeed won’t be possible.
What’s New:
New Login UI
Some of you had problems logging in using Android, so we made it a high priority to first fix the problem. The issue was due to the “release” signing key not being part of the Facebook Developer page. We tested everything on the “debug” app using “debug” signing keys and we didn’t do a manual device test using the “release” version.
We learned from our mistakes. Now, we make sure to test everything on a physical device. Let me know if you are still having login issues. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Recommendation Engine
We have made some changes to the A.I. Now the A.I. learns from what articles were seen but not clicked. This lets us calculate the CTR of each article for every user and globally as well. We will use these as features in our recommendation engine.
New blogs
We are always trying to find very good articles and blogs from the Internet. We found this amazing website called detailed.com. The blog lists a lot of top blogs on various topics. We have added most of the blogs in their top 50 for multiple topics. We will keep adding new blogs each day, send us a blog that you would like to see on PipFeed
Top 10 blogs on each topic
We have two amazing writers working for PipFeed: Adity & Amrita. They will be working this week to find the top 10 blogs to follow on various topics. Here are some of the lists. You can follow all these blogs on the PipFeed app.
Use your medium, Atlantic or any other Subscriptions on PipFeed
Do you already have a medium.com subscription? Most of us at PipFeed also do. You can use your subscription from other sources on PipFeed.
Just open an article by one of the blogs that you are subscribed to and log in using your details inside the webview. PipFeed’s article browser will remember your sign-in credentials and you can freely read articles using your subscription.
Use your medium, Atlantic and other subscription on PipFeed.
Improved Caching/speed
We have made some improvements to the article browser on PipFeed. Now it stores in cache all of the websites you have read on PipFeed. So the next time you open an article from the same blog, the Article will be loaded much faster.
We built PipFeed using Flutter and the framework is having some performance issues when it is loading high-res images. So to overcome that we have built a thumbnail generator. The app will run much more smoothly now.
Ads/Subscription
We are thinking of adding ads to the app. We haven’t added apps as it was making the app really slow. We are still looking at ways we can monetize the app. We are also looking into a subscription-based ad-free version of the app. Any Ideas?
And here is a look at our new Promo Video:
Thank You!!
Thanks a lot if you went through all our updates. Please feel free to send us an email anytime with any queries or suggestions or even if you just want to say hi.
Regards,
Shashank Agarwal
Founder: blog.pipfeed.com
