What particular aspects, interactions in this app make you feel like it was rushed? How could it be improved?
Looks like the ability to get alerts via an RSS feed has gone.. I've gotten less and less email alerts over time I honestly thought this would be something Google had on the deadpool list
It's there. When you edit and show options, you can deliver to email or RSS.
It's been gone for a while. But it's honestly to be expected that Google pulls only dickmoves regarding RSS, since RSS is actually counterproductive when it comes to showing ads.
Have they also made the alerts work reliably?
Eh, I don't think so -- and no PR related to it mentions Material design principles. The only thing about it that looks "material"-ish is a single-column paper card sort of thing and the bold color at the top. There are no animations, no reactive layouts, no shadows.
My issue with Google Alerts is they seem to only send me a few hits once in a while and when I actually search for my keyword phrase (which is long and has unicode chars in it), I find more and newer exact hits.
Oh, and the language selector is broken for me on OSX Chrome 35.