It’s my daily news driver and the app I am spending most time in. Have to find ways to limit the amount of sources, though. FOMO is a factor.
Only annoying thing, but I guess out of this app‘s influence is that the embedded safari doesn‘t use the Adblock plugin. AFAIK that’s an iOS/Safari restriction. This leads to huge amount of ads on same pages I open directly in the app. Any clues maybe?
Based on the description it solves exactly your issue, but requires iOS 26/macOS 26.
Personally I use Adguard + their DNS. This combination is very good, but WebView blocking will be working with the DNS part, not content blocker. So alternative is PiHole.
I stopped using NextDNS when I forgot to cancel subscription and contacted then immediately to issue a refund. They ignored my request, were no answers at all.
I am not alone, this is a typical behavior. At least it was 3 years ago.
Why do I need to pay for the service that I don't use anymore not £1.79 but ~£20 for a year? Okay, my mistake, I am okay to lose these £20, not a big deal.
But if the service ignores customer requests to the billing@ email, then that's not a good sign.
I use NetNewsWire for reading blog instead of "news". Sometime I wish it retains the articles, the current behavior will remove the article when it disappears from the source unless I add it to favorites.
Thank you Mr. Brent Simmons and the contributors for a great program.
which is ironic, because podcasts are built on this technology, if i remember correctly. but yeah. people "got" podcasts but somehow have a hard time accepting rss/atom readers.
Actually, RSS was not unaccepted from my experience. Instead, demise of Google Reader with the desire of user capture (Medium, newsletters and in browser notifications) starved reader applications of RSS feeds.
It accelerated when browsers removed RSS readers, so nobody had an incentive to offer them.
Since people fed up, RSS started to reappear. It was never dead for me, but finding feeds were impossible. Now the people I care to read offer RSS feeds, and I'm a happy RSS user again.
I started using this client a few days ago, in an effort to reduce my news addiction. By combining everything in a simple interface with chronological order, hope it helps avoid the flashy sources which make you scroll. Thanks to everything working on the RSS ecosystem
NetNewsWire Status
It’s been a year since I retired — my last working day was June 6, 2025 — and I like being able to say that I’ve spent the year adding nothing, not one penny, to shareholder value.
* * *
My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire.
A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms.
Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year:
Adopted Swift structured concurrency and async/await
Adopted Liquid Glass UI while still supporting recent OSes
Ported our XML, HTML, and date parsers from Objective-C to Swift
Fixed a ton of bugs, including crashing bugs
Reduced battery use, memory use, hang rate, scroll hitch rate, and disk writes
Did a bunch of performance enhancements, including (especially) finding places where the app could just do less work
Did a bunch of hygiene things — got GitHub CI running again, started using SwiftLint, turned on treat-warnings-as-errors, started work on localizability, switched to Logger, added tests
Simplified and refactored code, deleted code, renamed things, etc. — gained clarity in a bunch of places
Added support for Cache-Control headers for feeds, so publishers can tune how often NetNewsWire checks their feeds
Optimized iCloud syncing (still more to do on that one)
Dealt with deprecations (switched to NWPathMonitor, for instance)
Added diagnostics and error reporting to the UI — iCloud Storage Stats and the Error Log are shipping, and more like these are currently in beta: Dinosaurs, Current Activity, Activity Log, and Account Stats.
A list of highlights means I’m glossing over — or not even mentioning — things I really want to tell you about!
For instance, at one point I got frustrated with how I was handling Mac crash logs, so I wrote a little system that downloads them from my server and does symbolication. It’s simple but it makes a big difference — and it means not migrating to some commercial system, and having to add their SDK to the app, for this.
* * *
That last bullet point, the one with all the links, is all about giving users insight into what’s happening so that, when the app doesn’t behave as they expect, they can see what’s going on.
Even when they can’t fix the problem themselves, they can at least then copy-and-paste and tell me what’s up so I don’t have to guess. Between this and various bug fixes and improvements I’m able to spend less time on support, which means more time for coding — and, eventually, more time for the new features people are asking for.
* * *
We’re not done with foundational work, but it’s getting close. It’s so much nicer working on this app now than it was a year ago, and I’m so glad we spent the year this way.
I say we on purpose — I may contribute the most, but we have a bunch of other contributors, and I thank them all for all their much-appreciated help. Our most prolific contributor after me is Stuart Breckenridge, who did the Liquid Glass work (among other things) — and who has a new browser-based RSS reader named Gobbler that you should check out!
* * *
PS In the past year we also switched from Slack to a Discourse forum, so support and discussions can be on the web instead of hidden away.
NetNewsWire is part of my daily routine. The best feed reader out there with support for iCloud Sync and macOS native.
It’s my daily news driver and the app I am spending most time in. Have to find ways to limit the amount of sources, though. FOMO is a factor.
Only annoying thing, but I guess out of this app‘s influence is that the embedded safari doesn‘t use the Adblock plugin. AFAIK that’s an iOS/Safari restriction. This leads to huge amount of ads on same pages I open directly in the app. Any clues maybe?
You can try Wipr2/Filtr: https://kaylees.site/wipr2-whats-new.html
Based on the description it solves exactly your issue, but requires iOS 26/macOS 26.
Personally I use Adguard + their DNS. This combination is very good, but WebView blocking will be working with the DNS part, not content blocker. So alternative is PiHole.
Open in browser instead?
Sure that works, but it breaks the flow
Use Pihole.
NextDNS solves this.
I stopped using NextDNS when I forgot to cancel subscription and contacted then immediately to issue a refund. They ignored my request, were no answers at all.
I am not alone, this is a typical behavior. At least it was 3 years ago.
I use AdGuard DNS now.
Hang on, you forgot to cancel a subscription and then expected them to pay for your mistake?
And you never got your £1.79 back?!
Why do I need to pay for the service that I don't use anymore not £1.79 but ~£20 for a year? Okay, my mistake, I am okay to lose these £20, not a big deal.
But if the service ignores customer requests to the billing@ email, then that's not a good sign.
I use NetNewsWire for reading blog instead of "news". Sometime I wish it retains the articles, the current behavior will remove the article when it disappears from the source unless I add it to favorites.
Thank you Mr. Brent Simmons and the contributors for a great program.
I use it daily to catch up news and reading. Best RSS reader I have used on iOS.
Grateful for your hard work on this, Brent and team.
Wow, totally forgot I've used this rss reader in the past. Happy to still it's still rocking and stronger than ever!
Ps: love the statement "it's like podcast, but for reading".
which is ironic, because podcasts are built on this technology, if i remember correctly. but yeah. people "got" podcasts but somehow have a hard time accepting rss/atom readers.
i have netnewswire and it's great!
Actually, RSS was not unaccepted from my experience. Instead, demise of Google Reader with the desire of user capture (Medium, newsletters and in browser notifications) starved reader applications of RSS feeds.
It accelerated when browsers removed RSS readers, so nobody had an incentive to offer them.
Since people fed up, RSS started to reappear. It was never dead for me, but finding feeds were impossible. Now the people I care to read offer RSS feeds, and I'm a happy RSS user again.
I started using this client a few days ago, in an effort to reduce my news addiction. By combining everything in a simple interface with chronological order, hope it helps avoid the flashy sources which make you scroll. Thanks to everything working on the RSS ecosystem
It's amazing and we should hope for more apps to be stewarded by a person like this.
Migrated from Reeder to NNW, can’t be happier. Solid work and open source. Really appreciate!
Great app, love to use it, thank you to the creator.
This app is my daily driver! Love it, and hope the dev continues the good work.
lol, just read this feed in NetNewsWire. Thank you! Love it.
NetNewsWire Status It’s been a year since I retired — my last working day was June 6, 2025 — and I like being able to say that I’ve spent the year adding nothing, not one penny, to shareholder value.
* * *
My hope for retirement was to get a lot of work done on NetNewsWire.
A year ago it was in sore need of modernization, tech debt pay-off, and bug fixes. People were asking for features, but the foundation needed a ton of work before I could get on to adding new rooms.
Here are some highlights of what we’ve done with 2,188 commits in the past year:
Adopted Swift structured concurrency and async/await Adopted Liquid Glass UI while still supporting recent OSes Ported our XML, HTML, and date parsers from Objective-C to Swift Fixed a ton of bugs, including crashing bugs Reduced battery use, memory use, hang rate, scroll hitch rate, and disk writes Did a bunch of performance enhancements, including (especially) finding places where the app could just do less work Did a bunch of hygiene things — got GitHub CI running again, started using SwiftLint, turned on treat-warnings-as-errors, started work on localizability, switched to Logger, added tests Simplified and refactored code, deleted code, renamed things, etc. — gained clarity in a bunch of places Added support for Cache-Control headers for feeds, so publishers can tune how often NetNewsWire checks their feeds Optimized iCloud syncing (still more to do on that one) Dealt with deprecations (switched to NWPathMonitor, for instance) Added diagnostics and error reporting to the UI — iCloud Storage Stats and the Error Log are shipping, and more like these are currently in beta: Dinosaurs, Current Activity, Activity Log, and Account Stats. A list of highlights means I’m glossing over — or not even mentioning — things I really want to tell you about!
For instance, at one point I got frustrated with how I was handling Mac crash logs, so I wrote a little system that downloads them from my server and does symbolication. It’s simple but it makes a big difference — and it means not migrating to some commercial system, and having to add their SDK to the app, for this.
* * *
That last bullet point, the one with all the links, is all about giving users insight into what’s happening so that, when the app doesn’t behave as they expect, they can see what’s going on.
Even when they can’t fix the problem themselves, they can at least then copy-and-paste and tell me what’s up so I don’t have to guess. Between this and various bug fixes and improvements I’m able to spend less time on support, which means more time for coding — and, eventually, more time for the new features people are asking for.
* * *
We’re not done with foundational work, but it’s getting close. It’s so much nicer working on this app now than it was a year ago, and I’m so glad we spent the year this way.
I say we on purpose — I may contribute the most, but we have a bunch of other contributors, and I thank them all for all their much-appreciated help. Our most prolific contributor after me is Stuart Breckenridge, who did the Liquid Glass work (among other things) — and who has a new browser-based RSS reader named Gobbler that you should check out!
* * *
PS In the past year we also switched from Slack to a Discourse forum, so support and discussions can be on the web instead of hidden away.
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