Making Wortharead’s Mobile App Work Like Magic
(This was originally an email which has been slightly modified for blog format)
Hi 👋
If you’re reading this email, then you’re one of the first 1000 Worthareaders. So first, I’d like to say thank you for being a pioneer and giving our app a shot.
Second, in case you tried Wortharead in the past and it wasn’t to your liking, I have good news: it’s better now! Still far from perfect but much better.
Here are some of the major improvements and new features we’ve shipped in the last couple of months:
🏎️ Speed & Smoothness Improvements
Have you ever used Spotify and noticed how the music just continues to play smoothly even when your network drops or you’re traveling? Or have you ever used Tiktok and noticed how 20 thumbnail videos simultaneously play smoothly with no lag?
Likely not because, well, you didn’t need to notice. It just worked. Technology is at its best when invisible. When it feels like magic.
But unfortunately, when you build an app from scratch, it doesn’t work like magic in the way that Spotify or Tiktok do. So we at Wortharead have been hard at work casting spells and brewing potions to instill our mobile app with magic. Now, whether you follow only 10 feeds or 100+ feeds, get 10 new articles per day or 100+ new articles per day, whether you’re on iPhone or Android, new phone or old phone, the Today Feed and Your Library should be fast and smooth thanks to Infinite Scrolling (and the many bugs we fixed to make Infinite Scrolling work).
We also added horsepower to our backend. Now, even if you’re a power user following 30+ feeds, it should only take a couple of seconds to fetch all of your content (compared to as much as 10+ seconds in the past).
🔍 Faster, More Accurate Search
If you want to follow a new blog or newsletter (or a user — more on that later), chances are you’ll search for it. Unfortunately, our previous search box was abysmally slow and required a perfect text match, but luckily it’s now blazingly fast (milliseconds fast) and does fuzzy matching (thanks to our migration to Elasticsearch).
🤑 More Great Content in Your Today Feed
The biggest feedback we got after our Product Hunt launch was something along the lines of “I’m just not getting enough content every day.”
Thus we made it much easier to discover writers and publications that publish often to boost the content in your Today Feed. If you visit the Discover page, the first 1–3 feeds for each interest will be feeds that update often. Also, we have a Get More Daily Updates section suggesting the most popular, trusted feeds for your interests that update often.
✅ Mark All as Read
Tired of seeing the same content 2 days in a row? Now you can easily mark content as read and track your progress.
In conclusion, we hope to see you around Wortharead again! By the way, if you ever have any issues, or need help adding a new newsletter or blog, just reach out to me at nate@wortharead.app.
Happy reading!
Nate
