NetNewsWire: RSS Reader 17+

Could be more awesome

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!

Coming from Feedly

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!

Good, but could be significantly better

I used to use NetNewsWire years ago and loved it, I was so disappointed when it went away. I was excited to hear NNW coming back and that it would be available on my current devices (iPad/iPhone). However, over the years have experienced many new ways to consume my news including Feedly and News+.

When NNW was released, I was hoping that it would significantly improve my news reading experience, as it did years ago. Unfortunately, NNW feels to be the same app/workflow as it was back then with little evolution other than being on my iDevice.

Adding features such as Category (folder) views, device feed sharing (iCloud Drive), newspaper style view, duplicate elimination/aggregation, recommended feeds, auto category forward, and auto-read would make NNW my go-to news reading solution. Until then it will have to remain a throwback novelty.

Hopefully, these suggestions will help NNW become better and eventually become THE best RSS Feed reader available, as it once was.

Developer Response ,

Thanks for the feature requests! I’m not sure what you mean by a few of them, though. Would you email me? brent@ranchero.com