iPhone app offline support is just not reliable

Offline support in the iPhone app has been in since October, if I remember correctly, but to be honest it is just frustrating to use. Whenever I expect to be offline, in my case riding the subway where the connection is gone 50% of the time, I will be able to browse through a handful of articles (~ 10) before the app must fetch the next article from the server. Even though it claims to be downloading images and caching the articles for offline use before I go offline I find this is not really the case. I don’t even use Newsblur in these cases anymore because I know the offline support will not work. I used to use Reeder v1 with Google Reader and they had offline support nailed.

Any idea what is wrong here?

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I designed it for this use case. It works great, but I think you may have too few articles turned on in Preferences. I bet it’s 1,000 (the default). How many unreads do you have at the top of your feed list?

But offline works great for me, and that’s in both mixed connection that’s faulty/slow, and complete isolation with no service whatsoever. It really works well, but I have a feeling not enough stories are being cached.

I’ll try to debug it a bit more. Just seeing if anyone has this happen as well. My use is when I’m on the subway or taking a train with patchy 3G service.

I had set Newsblur to store 2,000 stories but normally I have anywhere between 100-800 unread stories. Although currently I’m down to 7.

Your reply made me question something… I have it set to store 2,000 stories but my “Stories in a site” setting is to “All stories”. Does this mean Newsblur is storing up to 2,000 stories total; unread stories + old stories = 2,000?

I changed “Stories in a site” to “Unread only” and will see if I can still reproduce this behavior on my commute home.

Thanks for the fast response Samuel!

It only stores unread stories, regardless of view setting. And since it claims it’s downloading everything, I’m afraid that it should be working pitch perfect. It does for me and I’ve been trying out the offline mode for a long time now. And I hit all three scenarios: full connectivity, partial/slow, and no service.