Thursday, August 29, 2013

Digg releases an Android app with Digg reader integration


The official Digg app for Android is here. The app lets users browse the Digg homepage, Digg or save stories, and send to Instapaper, Pocket, or Readability. It also lets users log in to Digg Reader, the recently-launched RSS reader that the company built to replace Google Reader, and use most of the functions available on the web version.

"By far the most common user feedback over the past two months has been some variation on, 'Where’s my freaking Android app, you lazy idiots!?'" the company wrote in a blog post. "This is our first Android release, and we’ll be updating and improving it steadily over the next few months."
Coming features for the RSS reader include a "show only unread items" view, text resizing and display mode options, and background updating. The reader also lets you toggle to see the article as it appears on the web (although it's unclear why you'd want to do that on a phone). Old-school Digg users will be disappointed to see that it's still impossible to comment on stories — items can only be Dugg, bookmarked, and shared.

Digg, the company, was bought by startup collective Betaworks and relaunched completely last year. Since then, it's spun up a fully redesigned homepage, an RSS reader, an iPhone app, and now the Android version. The new Digg has gotten pretty good reviews for its clean design and tightly curated content. The site is also once again a significant traffic source for publishers, with some reporting that Digg referral traffic has been growing 40 percent month-over-month since Betaworks took over.

Those numbers are likely to grow as Digg cultivates more happy mobile users. After a brief spin, the Android version seems serviceable; if it holds up to the 4.5-star iPhone app, Digg likely just reached a large chunk of users' pockets.

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