News Explorer is a full-featured yet easy-to-use RSS, JSON, Atom, Bluesky, Mastodon, Reddit, YouTube, and Podcast 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 sidebar.
• 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
• Add rich text notes to news, 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.
• Mark as read while scrolling as option.
• Image viewer to browse through all images of articles or feeds.
• Built-in support to share articles with 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 dialog or special 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 a lot!
This app hasn’t received enough ratings or reviews to display an overview.
I Love It!
samcomet
Used to use NetNewsWire and it was ok but it stopped getting better; i.e. no new updates and a down grade of the synching abilities. Still I persisted until I saw News Explorer. The interface is fantastic and it does what a news reader should - red the news. The build-in synch is something that I long ago forgot how great it can be. Thanks!
Closes the loop on iOS and Mac RSS
thing thing thing
I’d tried a few RSS readers that had Mac and iOS options - Reeder is nice, but its developer refuses to impliment iCloud sync, requiring users to cover the cost of a 3rd party sync service. Newsbar syncs via iCloud, but its Mac client is an (In my opinion) needlessly experimental user interface exercise.News Explorer does things (IMHO) correctly - the Mac client is a simple to comprehend 3 column view, which works overall in the way Mac users would expect an app, whose function is to allow them to categorise and consume information in any arbitrary way they see fit, to operate.There are some issues with the Mac version:- The categories view on the left column collapses category lists with hide / view button which is only visible when moused over, and entangles with the unread items count, rather than the vastly superior traditional disclosure triangle (the iOS version uses the iOS style of disclosure arrows).- *removed* Edit: See the developer’s response - a problem I’d had, is addressed in a preference that I hadn’t explored sufficiently at the time of writing - my bad. Full marks to the developer for making so much of the application’s behaviour user-configurable. That’s perhaps not something we’re as used to in these “a designer’s job is to say no" days, but it’s a very welcome return.- The “Toggle Reader View” button, which either swtches a fully rendered webpage to something like Safari-reader-view mode, or switches from extract to full text when viewing the RSS feed article, doesn’t function as a toggle - insofar as the setting doesn’t stick, it applies only to the currently viewed article. *edit* It would be nice to be able to have an option for that to be a global setting - perhaps a customisable toolbar similar to Finder with extra function buttons would bring a boost to what is already a very “power user” style of app.In short: This is the app you want, if you want a “normal” Mac app for RSS reading, that also has iOS versions, and syncs via iCloud. It has chronological viewing of time-based content, and that rarest of birds, a manual sync button - something that more iCloud apps should feature.There’s some room for it to improve, but thankfully, that’s for making good things better.
Developer Response
Thank you for your feedback! If you want to open the current article in an external browser, you must change setting 'Clicking the article title' in the Behaviors section of the News Explorer Preferences to 'Opens article in the default browser'.
• Fixed an issue with the sidebar in macOS 26 when closing full-window video player.
• Fixed unavailable font options in the app settings when using macOS 26.
• Fixed thumbnail extraction issue, sometimes resulting in a crash.
• Added support for quote posts in Mastodon feeds.
• Updated app icon with support for icon styles in macOS 26.
Version 2.2.3
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