News Explorer

News Explorer syncs across iPhone, iPad and Mac via iCloud, so no third-party feed service needed anymore. This is just fantastic! The developer is constantly improving the app as well, which is really great to see!

This is a highly customizable and useful RSS app. Syncing works well across devices. It would be nice to have a few more theme color options, and also to be able to specify which themes to use when the system is on light or dark mode (currently the switching is rather limited between a subset of themes). There are also a few UI peculiarities: The back button has different text depending on the name of the currently active folder/feed: “News Explorer” with an arrow when the name is long, “Back” and an arrow when it’s medium length, and just a back arrow when the name is long. It would be nice if it were just consistently a back arrow. It would be helpful to be able to set the margin for articles as well. It’s also somewhat distracting when loading articles from a feed that is set to use a Reader mode because it shows the RSS content briefly while loading. Some sort of loading animation or a blank screen would be less distracting while the Reader view is loading in such cases. I’d appreciate an option to show the Mark as Read button. In the lower left/right of the article list (at least on iPhone). Overall it’s a really great RSS app, and I’m glad to have found it.

I lean on this app daily on my phone, tablet and my MacBook….very clean and quick to use. This is my favorite RSS reader by far…

Love the app but noticed none of the icon changes are working for me on IPhone 15PM IOS 17.4. Thanks!

Which is unfortunately my main reason to use an RSS reader for YouTube. The iOS app works perfectly, but the tvOS app redirects to the YouTube app for video playback, which completely defeats the purpose.

I’ve had this app for over 5 years and absolutely love it. The presentation and navigation are superb and I love the offerings and customizations I can do. Highly recommend. The latest update seems to have affected some websites being parsed with the Mercury reader. Stuff that used to render fine is either blank or missing text/images. A few examples are on lithub.com, science news.org, sententiaeantiquae.com. All of these rendered fine without using the Mercury reader before this update but now need the reader but still are a little messed up.

I tried this RSS reader for the push notifications but outside of the test in the settings it never works. The app support has never responded to my request for assistance. I would like a refund.

Lowering my rating from 5 to 4 because they just removed the twitter support. Keeping up with twitter without RSS is impossible. If it’s too expensive put a membership or something just for it but don’t cut users out of it. I’m looking for another RSS now just because of this… 🙄

Big pros: 1. Everything is just smooth, clean, and works so well. 2. Keyboard functionality on Mac is handy. 3. The appearance customization is excellent. Menu bar, dock icon, notifications, thumbnails, lines of text, spacing, etc is all so great. 3. The timeline view is handy for certain use cases, like viewing news broadly or browsing movie releases. Features I'd request for the future (to keep up with other reader apps and the personal knowledge management trend): 1. Custom read/unread keep dates for different folders. 2. Subfolders, please!!! You'd be a pioneer for RSS readers. 3. Bionic reading. 4. PDF import. 5. Highlights/annotations, with a smart folder of all highlighted articles. 6. The ability to copy all highlights or sync them to note apps like Obsidian. 7. Rules/filtering, like including or excluding specific keywords. 8. Newsletter functionality, like an auto-generated email to be able to send newsletters to the app. 9. Text to speech audio that works during phone lock. Auto-jumps to next post. 10. Tagging, such as manually setting them when adding the RSS. 11. Reading progress for abandoned articles. Maybe in the post preview or in their own top folder/section, with the percentage that is complete for the post. Thanks again for everything in the app so far, it's a pleasure to use!

The new release with mastodon support is so slick. iCloud sync seems faster as well. It’s so nice to see an update. This app has held my news and blogs and other rss stuff for years. Now with mastodon support I can take rss feeds for accounts I want. Nice!