NewsRob Developer Interview
As of today NewsRob has has over 1,400 reviews and over 20,000 downloads and yet has held 
steadfastly on to its 4.5 star rating. All of its success being harvested from the efforts of its lead developer, Mariano Kamp who has worked tirelessly on it since it was first release 8 months ago.
After our NewsRob showcase recently, we managed to convince Mariano to talk a little about his app and the platform.
What made you develop something like NewsRob?
NewsRob does all the things that I ever wanted.
I really loved byline on the iPhone, but as the iPhone doesn’t let you run tasks in the background I always had to babysit byline downloading my stuff from Google Reader. As Android came out I waited for somebody to write an app like NewsRob, but at some point decided to do it myself.
I like NewsRob so much that I will never leave the Android platform until I can find a NewsRob replacement on another platform.
How much time do you spend developing applications?
I am very happy with NewsRob, but it takes a very serious amount of my time. It’s a kind of life changing experience to develop it 
Are you planning on developing any new applications?
It doesn’t seem that people using Android phones are willing to pay for software I don’t think that it is a sustainable business model doing it. Therefore I don’t see that I would develop another app anytime soon.
If I would I think the next thing would be a Flickr client.
What’s next for NewsRob?
I don’t have a fixed plan what to do next on NewsRob, but currently my thinking goes as follows: UI – Redesign I ,Notifications, UI – Redesign II (maybe exchanged with Notifications?!) , Widget (?), Google Web Transcoder Integration … And of course there is bug fixes and performance improvements, small enhancements like subscribing and unsubscribing from within the app.
Of course, this might change.
Why is NewsRob different from other RSS Readers?
NewsRob only deletes anything when at capacity, e.g. 500 articles, is reached and new articles are available. Marking something as read, either by just reading it or doing it explicitly from the menu, doesn’t delete a thing.
If you want to see the read items you can use the "Unhide (read items/articles)" menu from the options menu. NewsRob then shows read and unread articles. This is persistent. It will only go back to the previous mode if you tell NewsRob to do so.
Thanks for the info Mariano, and we look forward to seeing where NewsRob goes from here out.
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