A feed is a file, not a subscription
An RSS feed is a plain file that a website publishes listing its newest pieces: a title, a link, a date and usually a summary. That is all it is. Subscribing to one means telling a reader where that file lives.
There is no algorithm in that sentence. Nothing is ranked, nothing is recommended, and nothing depends on what the publisher thinks you will click. The list is in the order the site published it, which is also why plenty of people who were made to distrust algorithmic feeds went back to them.
Adding one is pasting a link
You paste the feed's address and the reader fetches the articles itself. There is nothing to configure and nothing to sign up for: one field, one button, and the articles are there.
The detail that catches people out the first time is that you need the
feed address, not the site's home page. It usually lives at
something like /feed or /rss, or behind the
orange radio-wave icon. Almost every site that has one also links it
somewhere on the page.
Finding the feed address, and something to try first
If you would rather not go looking for a feed address, the help panel carries five that are known to work, so you can paste one and see the whole thing running before you spend time finding your own:
- Ufumbuzi:
https://ufumbuzi.com/feed.xml - BBC News:
https://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml - The New York Times:
https://rss.nytimes.com/services/xml/rss/nyt/HomePage.xml - Wired:
https://www.wired.com/feed/rss - TechCrunch:
https://techcrunch.com/feed/
Once one of those works, the address of any other site is the same kind of thing: the site's own feed file, which is usually linked from the footer or behind an orange radio-wave icon in the corner of the page.
The unread filter is the whole point
There are three filters in the reader: everything, only what you have not read, and only your favourites.
The middle one is what turns a feed into something worth following. A pile of two hundred headlines is noise, and the only way through it is to give up. A list of the eight you have not read yet is a to-do. On a site that publishes fifty times a day, those are very different objects.
Read, unread, starred, and they stay
An article can be marked read or unread, and starred if it is worth keeping. Both states are saved together with the feed, so the list you come back to tomorrow is the list you left this evening, and not a fresh pile that wiped the work of marking anything.
Search that does not tell anyone
Search runs over the titles and summaries of the articles you already have, while you type.
It does not reach out to the network to do it. That means it works on a train, and it means no server is told what you are interested in. The second of those is not a feature bolted on afterwards: an RSS reader that searched through a server would be reporting your reading habits to whoever runs it, and that is precisely the habit of interest.
Three themes, and one of them matters
Light, dark and sepia, remembered between visits.
Sepia is the one that earns its place on a phone at two in the morning. A pure white page in a dark room is uncomfortable in a way that quietly stops people reading, and it is worse on an OLED screen where the whites are genuinely bright. Dark is the default choice for most, sepia for late nights.
Phone and desktop are not the same layout
On a phone, opening an article switches to a reading view that hides the feed list, with a button to go back to it. On a desktop the list stays on the left and the article opens beside it.
Neither is the correct one. The wide screen has room for both; the narrow one does not, and cramming a list and an article into 400 pixels makes both worse.
How it gets the feeds, and where that runs out
This is the part worth reading before you decide.
A browser will not let a page on one site read a file on another. It is the same-origin rule, it is there for good reasons, and it is the reason every web-based RSS reader has the same awkward problem. There is no trick around it from the client side.
This reader resolves it with a proxy that lives on the same site, which permits a set of well-known publications, and falls back to public mirrors when one of them does not answer. That set is the limitation: a small blog that is not on the list, and that the mirrors do not carry, will not load. It is a real boundary rather than a fault you discover later.
The proxy also pins the Access-Control-Allow-Origin header
to the reader's own domain instead of reflecting whatever was sent, so
other sites cannot quietly borrow it as a free relay. That is one less
reason to leave it running.
What it does not do
There is no account and no sync. Your feeds, your articles, your read marks and your stars live in the browser's own database on the device, and clearing your browsing data erases them. They do not follow you to a second phone.
Search looks at titles and summaries, not the full text of every article. There is no podcast support and no read-later queue that lives somewhere other than your device.
Getting it
The RSS reader is free, needs no account, installs from the browser as an app, and switches between English and Spanish from the same page without reloading.
Useful recommendations
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