How to set default full article retrieval in Android App?

question
#1

Hi everyone,

I’m looking for a hosted, open-source news reader with an app (or Firefox on Android extension) which can download the whole article text, not only the preview. Newsblur almost fits the bill, but I have one problem with the Android app:

  • I want the app to retrieve full articles by default, in the background, so that I can read them offline
    (this is how I read most of my news, offline). Unfortunately I can’t work out how to set this as the default in the Newsblur app on Android, the app will only retrieve the full article when I select story view. Can anyone help me?

Thanks :slight_smile:

#2

If you enable “Download stories” in the preferences, the app will pre-fetch new unread stories for offline reading, honouring the Story/Text mode for each feed. As for switching feeds that are that only publish previews/snippets into full text mode, just toggle them while reading using the Story/Text button to pick the best mode on a feed-by-feed basis.

#3

Thanks for the explanation. In fact I had already ticked “download stories” and was surprised that it didn’t seem to retrieve the full text of articles. It seems I have to manually set each feed to the story view, and even then it doesn’t automatically download these in the background, like I would expect. I’ll experiment some more…

Basically, how do I force the app to download the full article for all past news items, and to always download the full article in future?

#4

One caveat is that it will only pre-fetch story text for new unread stories published after you enable Download Stories and switch some feeds into text mode. If you have a bunch of existing unreads, it won’t try to go and spend hours downloading them due to background processing limitations.

have to manually set each feed to the story view

For feeds that only publish snippets, “Story” view is the shorter form, whereas “Text” mode is the attempt at extracting the full story text. (it is somewhat confusing that the button shows the state that you’ll switch to if you tap it, not the current state; so if it says “Story”, it means you’re already in Text mode. If you just leave it set to whichever mode looks better for a given feed and leave it that way, prefetching will happen in that mode.)

1 Like
#8

Can your answer be included in a FAQ or something? This really made me pull my hairs :slight_smile:

#9

You’re right, I’m adding a ticket to add a preference to turn this off, simply so that it is discoverable.

#10

Thanks @dosiecki, that’s a clear explanation.