Android Apps on Windows 11 (Part 2)

🔖 A diehard pen computing enthusiast wanted an 8-inch Android tablet but couldn’t find one to satisfy her wish list, so she decided to try to cobble one together with a Windows tablet. Was this the worst idea ever?

Confession: I am a bit of a news junkie.

In some ways, it was easiest to start with social media when considering how I want to use an Android tablet because it’s one of the things I do most on a tablet and something I do very rarely on a laptop or Windows 2-in-1. But it’s not necessarily the most important use case to me for a tablet. If I added up the time I spend on my tablets, the thing I’m probably doing most with them is keeping up with news, especially technology news. Ever since the premature death of Google Reader, I’ve been using Feedly as my main aggregator for keeping up with news stories from my favorite tech websites. But I also follow many tech and general-purpose news sites on social media, so the two purposes often cross each other in my mind and on my devices. And because I do want to be able to keep up with news across all my devices, the rock-solid syncing Feedly provides allows me to use whatever device is handy to see what is new in the world.

Android and Windows probably aren’t the best platforms for RSS and news readers, but fortunately, there are reasonable options on both. For keeping up with my feeds on Windows, I used to rely on Nextgen Reader, but it is a dead app now. The next best substitute for me has been FeedLab. However, it’s best suited for laptop and desktop use where you can have it as just another one of your open windows. When you want to focus on your feeds on a tablet, you want something that is better suited for that purpose and doesn’t fill your screen with what you don’t need. In this regard, Android apps are better and the Feedly app I’ve been using is Focus Reader.

I don’t ask for much from a Feedly app. I want to be able to read my feeds in chronological order from oldest to newest and I want to be able to easily and quickly access the full story if the feed is offering only snippets. I don’t really need AI summaries, and I don’t currently pay for any AI services. I also rarely favorite/star articles and I don’t often save them or send them to other apps for reading later. I have Instapaper and Omnivore for that. I use Feedly mainly to zip quickly through hundreds of articles, often skimming headlines and taking time to read full stories only when a topic is of particular interest to me. Focus Reader does an excellent job of meeting these relatively meager requirements. I’m able to customize typeface and font size, switch between light and dark themes, and fly through articles as fast as I want but read full articles when desired.

I’ve used NewsBlur and Feedbin as paid services in the past, but because I don’t need a lot of extra features, I went back to the free version of Feedly and instead just paid for the full version of Focus Reader.

Now, non-tech news is one of those things on Windows where just using the browser is a very viable way to catch up on news vs. using a news site’s dedicated Android app. I have subscriptions to a few news services, but I mainly go to their websites and very rarely use their Android apps even though I do faithfully install them yet mainly ignore them as they buzz my phone and watch throughout the day. However, there are some news aggregator apps that are very interesting. When Post.news was a thing, I used that as a news aggregator, but alas, that is also a dead app. I’d also really liked the Artifact app before it was gobbled up by Yahoo. I really assumed that acquisition by Yahoo would be a death sentence for the app - when had Yahoo last done anything to capture the hearts, minds, and short attention spans of the technorati - but Yahoo resurrected it and left it largely as it was before. When I want to see what news stories are trending across a variety of topics, I will open up the Yahoo news app and scroll around to see what’s new.

I had an account with Artifact that was tied to my Google account so I was able to have some manner of syncing and alignment across devices where I’d installed the app. I will right now admit to having a slight anti-Yahoo bias for no real reason other than it feels “old” to me. I remember the days when Yahoo was my browser’s home page, and I happily had a Yahoo email address that I PAID for so I could customize it and have extra storage. It was so much better than the Excite email I’d been using.

Wow, I am sincerely aging myself here. But in my last installment I told you I had a Nokia N95, so perhaps that goes without saying now…

Nevertheless, over time as other services sprouted, especially Gmail, it seemed old-fashioned and a bit unwise to even use the word “Yahoo” in polite company. But look, the Artifact app was pretty interesting, and Yahoo owns it now, so… I’m using it. But I have not yet set up the (or acknowledged that I have an old) Yahoo account for syncing, so I’m missing some functionality in terms of syncing up my reading and getting credit for what I read. Do I want credit with Yahoo? That sounds utterly ridiculous, but you know what, I probably do. I will probably eventually set up an account. It’s the right thing to do, right?

Anyway, I appreciate that Yahoo allows you to pick topics that are meaningful to you and it aggregates them together in one tab called "For You” but you can also dive deeper into other topics you’ve selected in their own tabs.

One of the most annoying things on an Android tablet (and iPads, too) is the limitation with extensions on the available browsers. I have installed browsers such as Kiwi and Lemur on my Samsung devices to get access to a few extensions that I like to use, but these browsers are rather flaky and crash often, probably because of the extensions. Firefox for Android has very limited extension/add-on support and doesn’t yet support extensions like Dashlane or Speechify. This is where using a Windows tablet is a much better experience than even the most expensive and sophisticated Android tablet. The ability to use multiple browsers and have extensions available in all of them is just wonderful. And installing websites as apps works much better as well.

So, when it comes to news, using a Windows tablet with Android app support is a winner. If only all things worked as well, but that’s a topic for the next installment.