The one thing that doesn’t come up a lot – or maybe it does and I miss it – is an app pulling in the full article.
To me, an RSS reader is pointless if all it gives me is a few sentences and I have to click to go to the web page to read the entire piece.
NewsExplorer and Unread are pretty great at pulling the entire article into the app, so you can read everything in one place without ads placed between each paragraph like on the news sites. I hear Lire is pretty good at this too. Reeder was okay at it, the new Reeder, I don’t know because I don’t use it.
But these apps that just pull a snippet (NetNewsWire/Feedly) – they don’t work for me. Too much clicking around.
And maybe things have changed with NNW and Feedly since I last tried them, but yeah, full article import is a must.
The thing is that it is a decision by the content creator NOT to include the full article into the feed or to do so. Most of them don’t because they want the consumer to visit the website in order to get paid (ads and whatnot) as content creators, which is perfectly understandable. Some content creators offer RSS feeds with the full articles, exclusively for those who support the creators financially (which I have chosen to do in some cases, too).
There are RSS clients that respect the content creator’s decision with no option to override it and there are RSS clients that enable the user to override it (per post or per feed). I am using Reeder and - yes - I have chosen to have Reeder fetch the whole article in Reader view in some cases (I think it is working just fine). But I am aware that it is a double-edged sword doing so. I try not to do it with “small” content creators.
For me, most of the time NNW is able to fetch the full article with tables while Reeder can’t. Sometimes NNW fails to show the first heading or related links at the end of the article. The only thing Reeder is not able to show is the table, otherwise I will have to choose opening the related webpage directly as a workaround.
Another fan of News Explorer here! The only feature I wish it had is a way to ingest newsletters. Right now I’m using MailGrip to convert my newsletters to an RSS feed so I can port them into News Explorer. It does a fine job, and is well worth a $12 per year subscription.
All of those are good points, yes. What I notice though is that we ourselves allow these practices of milking even for offline/local tools. Nothing stops the venerable mr Silvio (who hasn’t answered a support e-mail since 1993) from making it 50$ a year tomorrow. (But, to this point, nothing stops Iconofactory from closing shop either and there go my 90).
Despite where software development goes these days, I refuse to support everything becoming a SAAS subscription hell (with only acceptable exception being server costs for the backend). Vote with your wallet and all that.
I’m not saying devs aren’t allowed to earn past initial release, obviously. There are just other business models out there - a major update fee, yearly cycle or something like agenda - you’re left with feature access you’ve been subscribed for.
These days, I rely more on emailed newsletters, both paid and free, than I do on rss feeds. I reached a point where I needed to get them out of my inbox and into some place where I could read them when the time was right. I tried a bunch of things—including Readwise Reader—but they’re such close siblings to what comes in via RSS that News Explorer is the place they need to be.
It’s not we allow because people choose the tools they feel comfortable or valuable to use.
I wanted to use FOSS NetNewsWire instead of subscription-based Reeder, but I encountered some bugs in NNW in my cases (even between iOS 26 devices there are some feeds I marked read jumping out as unread but shown on iPad only). There are no thumbnails and if I want to read some articles later, it’s less intuitive to do than Reeder.
Although you said I can report to their bug tracker and send a request, I have no time to do so.
RSS reading is something I find necessary but not in the top priority, Reeder may not be perfect in terms of price but it’s within my acceptable level in which the small cost can save me a lot of time just reading to be inspired in a space rather than ending up struggling with being distracted on social media. NNW is like processing each email message and I have to do a task of marking things as read each time.
I’ve tried countless RSS readers, and my favorite is News Explorer thanks to its powerful filtering options. However, those features can make it feel a bit sluggish.
Fortunately, with modern AI tools, we can now easily build custom solutions to suit our exact needs. As of yesterday, I’m running my own hosted RSS server with a fast HTML frontend—giving me full control to fine-tune it whenever I want…
Thanks to the older version available, I can try News Explorer.
It’s great overall, and for some issues (like YouTube playing they did fix in latest versions) I can have a workaround. The main pain point, as I face in NNW, is there is no one click/swipe when I want to read an article later. New Explorer can hide the unread count but they still keep every item read/unread so I will have to mark read on other articles first.
For podcasts and YouTube experience, Reeder is more seamless as they have players embedded.
Although I briefly tested it, I recommend New Explorer if you don’t want any subscription but nice reading experience.
I think I have to change my mind, that Reeder can’t add some feeds (e.g. Building Your Brand) and even some feeds can be added, they can’t be updated (e.g. I can’t get the recent CoMaps article posted on 30 September).
Some sources of YouTube videos already can’t work unless I open the website, but all videos can’t.
Most importantly, the developer never replies. On Mastodon he never responds to any comments.
I don’t expect he can address every bug on time, and do agree communication can waste time, but I regard some communication as necessary so that I can know how I can help (e.g. maybe waiting for a few months).
The experience of Reeder is either working very well or being unable to work. Although some articles can arrive at NetNewsWire lately, they eventually come. They just work. They will finally work.
Unfortunately my experience told me that free softwares (not services based on cloud) always work well, although there may not be comprehensive features or beautiful interface. If it’s paid, it’s one-time purchase which works for a decade (e.g. iA Writer). Very few apps which need subscription can work well. Maybe Bear or Ulysses but I don’t need them, but most have frequent updates with the same logs every time leaving more and more bugs for years while prices keep going up.
I am paying Reeder every month and £1/month is grandfathered, while newcomers have to pay £1.99/month and £12.99/year (used to be £10).
I am always happy to pay regularly for a software or services, but sounds like the more I pay the more problems I will get.
Last update: v5.6 - “Ready for macOS 27.” A week ago. I had no issues with Reeder before v5.6 and I have none with 5.6.