How To Work Around The Feedly ‘Over Capacity’ Bug On iPad

By

Don't worry - they've got this.
Don't worry - they've got this.

If you’re like many of us in the tech journalist business, you rely on your RSS feeds to keep track of what’s going on in the blogosphere. That makes this transition time after the demise of Google Reader, a fantastic service (not an app!) that had great APIs to work with any third-party RSS reader client.

Now, however, that the search giant’s RSS system is dead and gone, Feedly has jumped into the fray, and basically created the second generation of the Google RSS system by cloning it onto their own servers. It’s a brilliant move, making Feedly a go-to site for all of us who want permanent sets of RSS feeds, but don’t want to have to manage it on a per-app basis.

Unfortunately, if you’ve grabbed the Feedly app for iPad lately, and managed to log yourself out of Feedly (that’s me!), you’ll get the above splash screen, which only looks like an over-capacity issue, but it really isn’t.

Turns out, Google’s authentication service just changed as well, and now is returning unexpected results when we try to login with as Feedly users. Here’s what the company has to say:

Sorry. This is not a capacity issue but a bug! During the login, it (Feedly) tries to connect to Google Reader to help you migrate your feeds. Unfortunately, Google changed last night and is returning HTML instead of JSON and the feedly mobile client 16.0.522/530 has trouble digesting that, showing a error card instead.

In other words, it’s a Google authentication service issue, which is hitting Feedly right where it counts. Ouch.

Luckily for Android users on Google Play or the Amazon App Store, the fix has already been submitted and you can update the app there. For iPad users, sadly, you’re stuck with waiting until the fix makes its way through the iTunes App Store update approval process, which could be a couple of days.

Feedly helpfully notes that any third party apps which have been recently update to use the Feedly API are not affected by this outage (yet another reason why RSS as a service is better than RSS as an app), so you can try out other apps like Reeder, Newsify, Mr. Reader, and Byline, to name a few.

Certainly this will all be rectified in the coming days, as soon as Apple approves the update, but if you’re needing to get your RSS fix right now (that’s me!), then this is how you can work around the current version’s bug.

Source: Feedly Blog

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