I’m a big fan of using RSS and I’ve loved the iOS and MacOs Reeder app for years.
Recently a new version of Reeder came out that’s in many ways different, but in many ways similar.
- It’s a subscription model to get all the features (but it’s VERY good value).
- It doesn’t integrate with other services for it’s syncing. It’s just a feed reader and read-it-later app that syncs over iCloud.
- It includes a video player and seems to also have a good podcast ability.
- It emphasises a timeline sync feature.
I immediately tried it out as Reeder is so good and I use it a lot. I was keen to see what was new and different.
First of all, the free version only lets you add 10 feeds, and as such it doesn’t let you import. So if you’re an existing Reeder user, it’s not easy to migrate and try it out, which was a bit sad. I’m hoping the developer will realise that this could be better and maybe a one-time import should be allowed or a free trial or something.
As I haven’t paid anything for Reeder since a £10 purchase of Reeder 5 for Mac in 2021, I was happy to pay £1 to get a month’s upgrade and do an import and try it out.
The first thing I realised is that my existing Reeder app syncs with Feedbin (which I also love – especially in the browser). And Feedbin has a bunch of other features that I use, like forwarding email newsletters, which I would miss in Reeder.
So I kind of immediately dropped it and unsubscribed.
But I kept opening it to check in. And what you have to get is that this timeline-sync thing is the main thing here. It’s trying to be a curated social news feed algorithm thing. You have to think of it like that.
And if you do, and you combine that with the save-for-later feature, you can scroll through your main feed; swipe to read-later anything that’s of interest, then switch to the read-later feed to actually read things.
And it’s quite a nice workflow.
So I’ll keep trying it out this month, but I’ll also keep Feedbin because the email newsletters thing is such a cool feature.
Feedbin can provide a combined feed of starred articles that I could subscribe to with Reeder, but that’s not really want I want.
I might try out kill-the-newsletter.com as a way to get around this – send newsletters to this address, and subscribe to that feed in Reeder. That might work and may be worth a try. But I don’t know how reliable and sustainable Kill the Newsletter is.
Anyway, it’s a nice app. It’s great value. I’m going to keep trying it and see if I can figure out a way to use it for what I need. But in the meantime it’s Feedbin and “Reeder Classic“.