Bloglovin’

The official Bloglovin' app for iPhone

In the fallout from the closure of Google Reader, another contender has appeared on the scene. Bloglovin’ is slick, well-designed and a serious rival to apps like Feedly and AOL Reader, and their app for iPhone is definitely worth a look.

So many blogs, so little control!

The Bloglovin’ iPhone app is divided into Browse and Following, in other words, blogs you might be interested in, and the ones you already follow.

Under Browse, Bloglovin’ gives you access to all your unread posts, as well as other posts and blogs that are popular or are well-liked. You can filter these blogs and posts by subject area or geographical location. It's a good way to find new content and interesting things to read.

Below, you have Following, or access to all the blogs you already read. They are listed A - Z, with the unread total to the side. You can perform some basic editing here, namely the ability to delete blogs and a mark all posts from a blog as read, but that's about it.Once in a post, you can also favorite it, or share it.

If you have very few blogs added, or you spend a lot of time on the web version of Bloglovin’, this is probably ok, but the lack of features like the ability to manage folders, or use more specific criteria to mark blogs as read means this iPhone app can't really be used as a substitute for the web version.

Disappointingly, the search function (a much-desired feature among Reader refugees) only allows you to search for new blogs, and doesn't allow you to search within your feeds.

Some features a little hard to find

Bloglovin’ is well-designed and easy to use, but remember to pull menus down to access additional features. We also noticed that it took quite a long time for the app to sync with our online folders, so don't be worried if your feeds don't automatically show up.

An iPhone classic

This app is designed with the iPhone in mind and it shows. It's sleek, smooth and, in our tests, worked perfectly. Blogs look good, and post layout is very stylish. We really can't fault it.

More control!

Bloglovin’ is one of those apps that we really wanted to like, but ultimately, we couldn't overlook some glaring deficiencies. For many, lack of feed search is a deal-breaker, while the way that all your feeds are grouped, without folders or categorization, make things very messy for users with multiple feeds.

In short, it's a nice app, but doesn't have the control blog power readers (or even just enthusiastic users!) need. A few more organization criteria, and we'd give it a solid 9.