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For the longest time, RSS readers have followed an “Inbox Zero” design philosophy by showing an unread count against each source. If you have more than a dozen feeds plugged into your RSS reader, good luck getting that to zero.
Silvio Rizzi, the developer who built the popular RSS app Reeder, wants to cater to the audience that wants to get away from the pressure of unread count with the redesign of the app. Reeder’s new avatar is more about being compatible with more sources like YouTube channels, Mastodon and Bluesky feeds, Reddit channels, podcasts, and comic strips.
Rizzi is not discontinuing the old app. but it now has a different name: Reeder Classic. He told TechCrunch over email that while Reeder Classic already supported sources like YouTube and Reddit, it didn’t have the ideal viewing experience.
“What some people may not realize is that most of the content the new Reeder supports — like YouTube, Reddit, and Mastodon — could already be consumed with Reeder Classic. So, in that sense, not much has changed,” Rizzi said.
“The change is that the content is no longer retrofitted into a viewer that was originally designed just for RSS feed articles. The new Reeder offers different viewers for various types of content, such as articles, photos, videos, social media posts, and podcasts. It’s designed to be easily extendable for adding new types of content in the future.”
Even though some of the core propositions of the app remain the same, Rizzi built the app from scratch. With the previous RSS-style app design, the iCloud sync had become unreliable and slow as it tried to fetch everything. With the new version, it only fetches things like your subscriptions, timeline position, and tagged items for syncing. Getting rid of unread count across devices has also had a positive impact on speed overall, the developer said.
Because Reeder has multiple sources, you can build a curated feed and share it with friends or on social platforms as well.
The app is free to use, but you will need to pay $1 per month or $10 per year for shared feeds, syncing Mastodon and Bluesky timelines, and creating more than ten feeds. Rizzi said that Reeder will soon get more swipe actions for lists, new layout options, smart feeds, and keyboard shortcuts.
Reeder is not the only app trying to build a solution around saving and consuming multiple sources in one place.
Some other appmakers are also toying with the idea of combining multiple types of feeds. The Browser Company’s engineer indie app Nate Parrott’s Feeeed is one example. Twitterrific’s team is also building an app for various feeds called Tapestry. While former Twitter engineer Joe Fabisevich’s Plinky app is not strictly a feed reader, the app works with multiple formats.
