News Explorer is a full-featured yet easy-to-use RSS, JSON, Atom, Reddit, YouTube, Podcast, Bluesky and Mastodon news reader with iCloud synchronization between Mac, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV.
Full iCloud Sync
• News Explorer syncs your feeds, filters, folders, articles including statuses, notes and tags, across all your Apple devices.
• Synchronization is based on iCloud, so there is no need to login or to sign up into any other service, it just works out of the box.
Smart Filters
• Filter your news according your own conditions and preferences, easily accessible from the feeds list.
• Filters customizations are synced across all your devices.
Automatic Reader View
• Use automatic Reader view to download and read the full text version of truncated articles from supported sources.
• News Explorer makes use of multiple parsers to offer the best Reader view results.
Article Comments
• Read article comments from other readers directly in the app.
• Works with RSS feeds that has comment feeds per article, YouTube feeds, Reddit feeds and Hacker News feeds.
• Also works with most feeds from websites that use Open Web comments.
Article Notes
• Create rich text notes, directly in the context of the article.
• Notes are synced via iCloud together with the related article.
Feed Settings
• All aspects of a feed like title, source link or icon, can be adjusted in the Feed settings dialog.
• Disable the feed temporarily or permanently.
• Override app settings for syncing, downloading comments and reading articles.
Feed Prefilters
• Prevent the app from downloading articles you don’t want to see or read.
• Prefilters are synced via iCloud, and can be easily configured on feed level in the Feed settings dialog.
Article Inspector
• Inspect metadata, tags, media, notes and comments of articles in the Inspector panel.
• View and add custom tags in the Metadata panel.
• Browse and download media, including podcasts, in the Media panel.
Article Tags
• Article categories of RSS articles are displayed in the Inspector panel as tags.
• Can be extended with your own tags.
• Custom tags are easily recognizable, and are synced via iCloud.
• Tags can be used as conditions in filters.
Local Account
• Add feeds to News Explorer that only exists on your device by activating the Local account option.
• The local account option can be used in addition to or instead of syncing with iCloud.
Reading Features
• Mark items as favorite for later reading.
• Navigate with one click to the original content.
• Full keyboard navigation.
• Full text search in the List and Timeline view.
• Mark as read while scrolling option.
• Image viewer to browse through all images of articles or feeds.
• Built-in sharing to Instapaper, Raindrop and Readwise.
• Share news items via Email, Messages and other services.
Configuration Features
• Countless settings to tweak layout, fonts, behaviors and more.
• Import and export feeds via OPML.
• Add new feeds via the Search new feeds or Add feed dialogs.
• Organize your feeds by assigning them to folders.
• Multiple themes, tint colors and app icons.
System Features
• Create automations with News Explorer actions in the Shortcuts app.
• Option to index articles with Spotlight.
• Local notifications for feeds selected in the Feeds Manager.
• Widgets with adjustable sources and fonts.
Multi Platform
You only need to buy two apps to cover all Apple platforms:
• News Explorer for Mac is available on the Mac App Store.
• News Explorer for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV is a universal purchase app, available on the App Store of the mentioned devices. On visionOS you can use the iPadOS edition of News Explorer.
Support
• News Explorer has an extensive help page on https://betamagic.nl/support/newsexplorer/help.html.
• If you still have questions or need support, email us at support@betamagic.nl.
If you like News Explorer then feel free to leave a review or a rating in the App Store, it helps us a lot!
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!
Great RSS app
Noone99
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.
It’s ok
w00d
I downloaded this app because I’m an RSS junkie and I’m tired of paying for and aggregator service (not to mention I’m ready to go back to having my OPML list being private). I’ve used most of the apps but Reeder requires an aggregator for syncing devices and NetNewsWire doesn’t do local syncing (yet) so iCloud sync was very attractive and it does work well. My complaint is with the UI, specifically how the app hides the UI in the article view. I’ve had more than one occasion where the UI disappears in the article view and nothing I do will make it reappear leaving me to scroll article by article. The back button should be persistent and there should be an option to skip to the next article in article view without having to scroll all the way through the article. Finally the way the app handles inline comment boxes is very frustrating-talking specifically about Slashdot here-you either scroll the comments or close the app entirely if you swipe in the wrong place. Don’t get me wrong, this app is better than most but still needs refinement. You may find you like it but I’m going back to NNW to wait for iCloud sync.UPDATE: Responding to the developer, yes, I understand how it should work. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t work that way consistently. When I finally gave up it was because I could not make the UI appear AT ALL. Every time I opened the app it would open in article view with no UI to go anywhere else. This even persisted after force quitting the app. If I have to reinstall the app just to make it work the way it should, I might as well reinstall an app without this kind of issue. FWIW, I didn’t have this problem on my iPad. Really puzzling to me: swiping from article to article is a thing, so why not a swipe to get back to the articles list? It’s a pretty common “go back” gesture in lots of apps.
Developer Response
If you have selected 'Horizontally with page curl' for setting 'Swipe to next article', then please change this back to 'Horizontally'. The 'page curl' is in the current version not compatible with the 'Auto hide bars' feature.
Finally. This is it.
~bc
Wow. Finally. I'm a UI snob. I've used RSS since it was developed. I've used the iPad since is was introduced, and instantly I realized it was the perfect RSS reading device. And now, after all this time, I've finally found an app that meets my expectations. I wanted something that uses as much core Apple technologies and UI style as possible. I wanted flexible themes text sizes. I didn't want the UI to be "unique". The best design is "invisible" meaning you don’t notice it because you're fully engaged with your task, and it's not getting in your way. This is it. It's not without fault. Putting feeds in folders is a total pain. But that's something you do rarely. I'm giving it a pass and 5 stars because it is much better than the competition, and allowed me to drop an aggregator subscription. I even had an excellent interaction with support (the dev himself) when I couldn't figure out my OPML file. He showed me what I was doing wrong. Bravo.
• Fixes a crash with option "Open feeds list" for behavior "After marking all as read".
Version 2.2.7
The developer, Ron Elemans, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer’s privacy policy .
Data Not Collected
The developer does not collect any data from this app.
Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More
The developer indicated that this app supports the following accessibility features. Learn More