Taptu | Life of Android

The Story

Social networking apps are two a penny these days, even the ones that manage to pull together your numerous feeds from Facebook, Twitter and the like into one stream. So why on Earth should you bother with Taptu? Put simply, if you own an Android tablet it’s the perfect delivery system for the wealth of content that clogs up your feed every day.

The Experience

Taptu is best explained as an RSS reader which covers both your social media needs and your favourite websites. Feeds are displayed horizontally across the tablet screen and can be arranged by size and importance. There’s also a ‘Most Shared’ bar at the top of the app, allowing you to see what other Taptu users have found funny and informative in the last 24 hours.

Browsing through the app is a generally smooth experience with blog posts and website links all well formated for Taptu so you don’t have to keep switching back from Browser. Sometimes pictures can be a bit grainy and it’s a shame feeds won’t display horizontally but otherwise there’s nothing to complain about here.

What really makes Taptu special however, is its RSS function which allows you to customise the app completely to your tastes and in a pretty stylish manner. The Guardian, Popjustice and UK Political Magazines are all featured streams although you can search for new flights of fancy by topic or import your old favourites from a Google Reader account.

All fairly standard so far, right? Well, it all improves drastically once you employ these features as widgets on your Android tablet’s homescreen. This way you don’t need to go directly into Taptu to… tap into its deep reservoirs of content, thereby ensuring the app always has something to offer whether or not you want to spend hours using it.

It’s this flexibility that we applaud most about Taptu. Too many social media apps force you to fit yourself around them, when in fact it should be the other way around. Taptu never fails to place the user at the centre of its tabloid experience and for that reason, it gets a hearty thumbs up from us.