Well apparently Tapatalk took on Venture Capital and the investors are pushing them in a "new direction". The backlash from the community was more vicious and vocal than anything I have ever seen in my many years of being in the software business. The investors must be total idiots because they threw away a priceless combination of brand awareness and market position. Tapatalk had become top dog, beating out Forum Runner and others, due to their outstanding human engineering on their interface to various forum systems out there. The mid-summer Tapatalk HD was simply a beautiful piece of software engineering, as agreed by many many people.
By forcing the engineers to "re-purpose" the software, the human interface was destroyed, replaced by the lame overly cutesy inflated and obscure interface we had in November. The hate mail was unbelievable. It only takes a little bad news to ruin years of accomplishment and growing appreciation.
Well, they are trying to recover. Despite being told that their first step would be to go back to (ad free) Tapatalk HD of Summer 2014, they are not doing that. Mistake #2 (I think they are saving face). Nonetheless they have been making changes that have improved Tapatalk's usability as a forum reader. At least it doesn't force you to see the useless "feed" view when you start it up; it remembers the last view you had. No one can figure out what the feed is supposed to do :-)
Bottom line of this post: Update your Tapatalk and give it another try. It is not at all obvious how to use it, but you can get unread and subscribed views of each forum. The push notifications are useful. Any thread you subscribe to will generate notifications on your iPad or Android in real time.