NetNewsWire: RSS Reader 17+

NetNewsWire does everything I’m personally looking for in an RSS reader and does it well. If you’re coming from Feedly it handle opening in browser much better. There’s a button for reader mode that fetches the page but skips all the banners, ads, and autoplaying videos that have become too common on the major news outlet websites. With Feedly this is at least two or 3 taps.

Feeds can be stored locally or in iCloud so they sync across devices. I’m a big fan of this and use the distinction for some feeds I want on my phone but not everywhere.

Finally and most importantly I love what NNW isn’t. No suggested stories algorithm to keep me scrolling endlessly. No AI features. No features hiding behind a subscription. Just a clean and simple way to be in control of news and web content you would like to see.

This app is great. I like being able to view RSS feeds in a simple view and access all of the features of a typical feed reader. However, there should be some other features too.

1. Group your RSS feeds. If I have multiple feeds that relate to the same topic, why can’t I group them? There should be a way to browse through your articles by group and see articles that are only related to a specific topic while maintaining iCloud sync in one account.

2. There should be an option to manually “delete” RSS feed items by swiping left instead of right. This is different from deleting an entire feed and all of the articles in it. By “delete”, I mean hide an article from your list and remove the download from your device.

3. Speaking of downloads, there should be an option to see how much space your downloaded RSS feed articles take up on your device and manage the ones you no longer need.

4. More themes would be great. You should be able to make a custom theme using a main color and an accent color. For example, the app can be made green with the menu buttons being a lighter green. Maybe there could be an option to change the app icon for NetNewsWire.

Other than that, I think this app is great!

NetNewsWire doesn’t do everything Feedly does of course. But Feedly is far from perfect as well and the company behind it caters more and more to corporations. NetNewsWire offers almost everything I need and I actually use this feed reader for my job. The only thing missing for me are tags for saved items. Other than that I’m happy. I use the iCloud sync. I’ve installed the apps on my iPhone, iPad and two Macs. So far everything works flawlessly. I hope iCloud does its job reliably. As we all know that’s not always the case. Nothing NetNewsWire can do about it. Thank you to everyone involved in this app for making it possible!