By the time Apple released their first tablet the model for reading RSS articles on iOS had already been established. Clients like NetNewsWire, Reeder, and others gathered their feeds from Google Reader, and synced back the status of each article so that the reader’s progress could be shared with other RSS clients on any platform. This relationship benefits the reader who never has to read the same thing twice across multiple devices, and the app developer who never has to code subscription management into his applications. Even Google, who offers the Google Reader service free of charge, benefits by strengthening their pagerank algorithm against the statistical analysis of every user’s reading list.

iOS apps adopted this method of RSS consumption because it is convenient, but convenience is a hard master to overcome. The most popular RSS applications on iOS cannot manage their own feeds. They must rely on the user to visit the Google Reader web page or a capable desktop client to add, remove, or categorize a subscription. If mobile newsreaders are going to stand as equals next to their desktop counterparts then independent feed management needs to be a priority. This is especially true for the iPad where isolation from the desktop is desired, and a larger screen allows for a expanded feature set compared to iPhone applications.

The Early Edition, an RSS application for the iPad, first came to my attention when I was searching for an alternative for Google and needed a reader that could manage its own feeds. Billed as your own personal daily newspaper… The Early Edition takes the news sources that you enjoy and presents their content in a format which resembles newsprint complete with headlines, captions, and columns. The design, if not convincing, is polished. A lot of time has been taken making sure the articles are autonomously laid out in a pleasing fashion. Even the faux page curl feels appropriately weighted, and the icon is one of the best in iOS. The Daily Edition may be the most beautiful iPad application for users looking to read their RSS feeds in the form of a newspaper, but for me The Daily Edition’s value comes more from its subscription management than its knack at resembling the printed page.

Out of all of the iOS newsreaders I sampled only The Early Edition can import my existing subscriptions using an OPML file. All competing RSS clients require a Google Reader account or force you to enter the address of each feed you want to add one by one. The Early Edition lets me organize my feeds into individual categories which I can browse independently like the sections of a newspaper. What was a collection of technology stories can quickly become a dedicated periodical on design, or a stack of photography articles. Individual feeds can be organized in their own paper going back the life of the feed. Exporting feeds from The Early Edition comes in the form of a OPML attachment sent by email. Individual articles can also be emailed, sent to Instapaper, posted on Facebook, tweeted on Twitter, delivered to Delicious, received by Read it Later, opened in the internal browser, or passed to a new tab in Safari. Compared to a desktop newsreader there is very little The Daily Edition cannot do.

The Early Edition’s greatest fault maybe the newspaper presentation that sets it apart. You will never find your subscribed articles in a straightforward list and there is no visual difference between a story you have read and one you have not. Individual articles can be read alone on a separate page, but the text-size and typography cannot be changed. Making your way back to the newspaper summary from the single page view means finding your place among a page of loosely organized unmarked articles. Finally although The Early Edition delivers your news much faster than a traditional paper it is slow at refreshing your feeds compared to alternative readers. This may be because The Early Edition has to visit all of your favorite sites to retrieve all of your feeds while competitors who rely on Google Reader only have to visit one.

The Early Edition delivers a similar experience to reading your news from a dead tree newspaper including many of the inherent navigational quirks. It gives you greater control over your content than any newspaper ever will, and manages your feeds directly while alternative applications rely on the cloud to do their subscription management for them. I might not have kept using the Early Edition if all iOS newsreaders were so capable, but for all of its quirky newspaper nostalgia at least it doesn’t get ink on my fingers.