Apple’s platforms are the land of thoughtfully designed apps and utilities, and it’s not limited to official apps. An indie app like GoodLinks helps you research better, and an app like Almighty will make you a Mac God.
My favorite, though, are RSS reader apps. Yes, you can download apps that come with RSS services like Feedly and Inoreader, but you’re missing out on most of the fun with these. These apps are built to be cross-platform, are heavy, slow, and don’t have any customization options.
Instead, if you’re on Mac or iPhone, try specialized RSS readers built by passionate indie developers, and a whole new reading experience will open up for you. Your content can still come from Feedly (or you can sync your feeds using iCloud), and you can enjoy features like fast, native, full-text feeds. But there’s also options for custom typography, themes, keyboard shortcuts, sharing options, and even additional sources like YouTube, Reddit, and Mastodon.
Reeder (and Reeder Classic)
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
For more than a decade, Reeder has been a staple of the RSS apps market for Apple devices. It provides a fast and sleek RSS reader that’s actually a delight to read. The minimalist app puts the reading experience first, and I like that a lot.
Now, the app has been split into two. The original Reeder app is called Reeder Classic, and it still offers the same, traditional RSS experience where you can connect couple of RSS syncing services and read all the latest articles. Reeder Classic is a one-time purchase from the App Store ($4.99 for iPhone and iPad, $9.99 for the Mac).
The new Reeder app is now more of a social reader. It does away with traditional RSS features like keeping an unread count and being able to connect to different RSS syncing services. The Reeder app syncs only using iCloud, which allows it to create social-media like timeline syncing, where the read position is synced automatically across all your devices.
Being a social reader, the Reeder app goes beyond articles and lets you add YouTube channels, Podcasts, subreddits, and entire feeds from Mastodon, Bluesky, or Micro.blog.
Once you’ve set everything up, Reeder can be the only place you need to go to read, listen, and watch content online. Reeder also has quite an interesting take on shared feeds. You can turn any tag into a shared news feed, and you can use it to curate articles to share with your friends, or followers online.
The downside is that the new Reeder app is still not fully finished. For example, at launch there’s no way to create folders (a staple of RSS readers) or change the font size or style in the reader. Both features, thankfully, will be added in future updates. The premium version of the Reeder app is now subscription-based, running $1/month or $10/year (the free version is restricted to 10 feeds, and lacks features like connecting to Social media accounts and feeds).
NetNewsWire
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
If all you want is an incredibly simple, fast RSS reader that’s designed natively for Apple devices and that’s also free, check out NetNewsWire. This is a free and open-source project that’s community supported and is in active development.
You can sync using popular services like Feedly, Feedbin, Inoreader, and more. You can customize the article themes, there’s a dedicated Reader view, dark mode, keyboard shortcuts, folders, and all the basic features you’d expect from an RSS reader app.
Fast, simple, and no frills is the way I would describe NetNewsWire.
Lire
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Lire is an RSS app for iPhone ($9.99) and Mac ($9.99), and it specializes in one thing—full-text feeds. Many sites only show a portion of the article you’re trying to read in RSS feeds. That means you either have to click through to open the website, or you need to use a built-in reader mode to load the article content, which takes a bit of time.
Lire, instead, downloads and parses the text from the website straight to your device. Before you even start reading, it will download text for hundreds of articles together, and all that content will be ready to read, even when you go offline. Lire is great for catching up on content, or skimming through news sites, without any kind of waiting time.
Other than that, Lire is a regular app. You can use it as a standalone RSS app, or you can sync using popular RSS services like Feedly, Inoreader, and more.
Unread
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Unread is all about style. I remember using it almost 10 years ago on my first generation iPad mini. It just looked so cool. The combination of beautiful typography and colorful themes was genuinely a sight to behold. But that’s not enough for me, at least these days. Unread has gone through many updates, but retains its characteristic style.
The downside is that there’s no way to change the app’s default font, Whitney. If you don’t like it, you should look at other apps on this list.
If you like the font, though, you’ll enjoy using Unread. The app is native and wickedly fast at loading up dozens of feeds. If you choose to pay for Unread Premium ($4.99/month or $49.99/year), you get extra perks like automatic caching of text and images ahead of time, custom Dock icons, widget customizations, Safari share extension, and article actions.
But even without paying, Unread works out to be a great RSS reader. Like Lire, it too can automatically load full-text from RSS feeds, though you have to expressly enable it for each site, which is a bit of a hassle.
Feeed
Credit: Khamosh Pathak
Feeeed is a social reader app that’s built around an RSS framework. Feeeed is completely free and works only on iPhone, so there’s no Mac version. It’s also quite an opinionated app and will bunch up related stories from all your feeds together, plus it will default to an algorithmic feed (you are free to change that to a traditional timeline if you want).
Feeeed, being a social reader, lets you add YouTube channels and Subreddits in addition to articles, but unlike Reeder, doesn’t let you sync your entire Mastodon feed, which is a bummer (you need to follow each Mastodon user individually). All that aside, Feeeed makes for a lightweight and fun reader for iPhone. Check out our previous coverage of the Feeeed app to find out more.
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