Kagi News App: First Impressions

Software
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Kagi News was unveiled today. I installed it on my iPhone and am really impressed so far. It’s also available for iPad, Android and Web.

It has a very clean, modern look and feel. You can choose which categories you want to see (e.g. I added Canada and Apple to the defaults). News articles are drawn from a variety of sources and beautifully presented.

For example, here’s the Apple feed with an article on yesterday’s OS 26 releases:

2025-09-30 - Kagi News
2025-09-30 - Kagi News5880×3000 2.14 MB

On a side note, the CEO of Kagi, Vladimir Prelovac, was recently a guest on Mac Power Users (MPU #809). I signed up for the Kagi search engine about a month ago and continue to be impressed with the company and its products.

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Thank you for sharing this! This app is great.

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Thanks for sharing; Google News used to be a great product but I have abandoned it since and depend on my own RSS list. I am glad to try Kagi News - happy to see it being free too.

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The only problem is such apps is, they only last 1-2 years and disappear. They can’t find enough paying users > resort to ads > die. History repeating itself…

PS: I’ve tried enough apps like this which are great from user POV, but bad business wise.

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Kagi already charges for Kagi Search. I’m a paid subscriber and get excellent value from this offering. I suspect they’ll have a paid tier of Kagi News at some point or maybe offer it as a value-add for Kagi Search subscribers. Time will tell.

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That’s because aggregating RSS feeds at scale used to be expensive in terms of bandwidth/server usage, like 15 years ago.

Today’s computing costs for this workloads are more modest so you need a smaller paying customer base and there are some services that have survived for some time like Newsblur, Inoreader, Feedly, The Old Reader… Plus some of the apps are not server-based but do their own downloading and parsing on device and sync through iCloud (News Explorer comes to mind, there are many others).

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Looks great Tim - I"m looking more at Kagi Search and didn’t realise the Kagi News app was a thing. I think my members may like this… good man!

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RSS apps can work for free, there is minimal to no server work needed. For news it’s becomes tricky. Curation, aggregation, filtering, ranking, personalization, etc, that requires compute, and it costs over time. Most people don’t pay for news apps. It might still be valuable for certain people but again, scale is important for a business to survive.

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Great app, a nice balance of articles, great addition to the Kagi ‘ecosystem’ is probably the best way I can think to put it! I’ve also been giving Kagi Search a run through recently and it definitely warrants the subscription. It may seem alien paying for Search as we have become so used to it being ‘free’, but I would challenge anyone to try it out and then go back! Kagi News is something everyone needs in their lives!

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I’ve really come to appreciate Kagi Search. I paid for a year on September 1 and will likely renew in 2026.

Kagi News is hot off the press (so to speak); it was just released yesterday (September 30, 2025). It could make a great Tip Tutorial for SCO Members.

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Thanks for bringing this service to my attention! I really like it so far. I like that you can have the summaries translated into the language of your choice. Makes it easy for me to follow Finnish news even though my Finnish is very weak.

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Thank you very much for the info.

There is even a GitHub repo: GitHub - kagisearch/kite-public: Open source repository for Kite, news app by Kagi.

And nice that they list many sources (including RT):

Screenshot 2025-10-02 at 06.02.42
Screenshot 2025-10-02 at 06.02.421034×476 180 KB

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RT… that’s concerning. It seems like one can filter certain words. Can one also remove sources?

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I must be missing something. The list of categories you can read is extremely narrow. I can’t find any of my usual news topics.

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But perhaps not surprising, since they apparently do business with Russian companies (Yandex), despite sanctions?

(One of the reasons I don’t use Kagi products)

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OK looked into it some more.

So the app is just a front end for their own shared RSS aggregator, which then uses their own method for summarising the results in app. Not a bad idea.

The problem is that they’ve only launched with a small number of categories. If you want more categories you have to source 25 (!) high quality RSS feeds on the same topic, then either do a pull request on GitHub, editing the JSON yourself, adding all 25 feeds and hoping it gets merged; or raise an Issue on GitHub, providing all the RSS feeds and hoping someone does it for you. (This isn’t explained in app by the way).

So unless you want to spend your weekend finding several dozen RSS feeds, its a lottery as to whether it will provide news on any topic you’re into.

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I can do that on my RSS app and 100% guarantee that it will work. I am going to pass on this one.

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Thanks! That’s also concerning. I will not continue using Kagi.

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Thanks for pointing this out, I won’t be subscribing to any of their products in light of this information, I don’t want my money to be going to Russian military funds. I was going to start a trial after seeing all the hype around Kagi, but now I’m certainly not going to if they don’t have moral and ethical business practices.

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But happy to buy Apple products who give pay other countries that help fund the Russian war machine amongst other things. Probably the same for most products we buy.
If the Yandex story is accurate I suspect that it’s a drop in the ocean.