![]() Neither were apps that don't offer a full reading experience, such as browser extensions or menu bar widgets. News apps that don't allow this, like Apple News, weren't considered. I've also reviewed software in general, and Mac software in particular, for over a decade.įor this review, I only considered traditional RSS readers-that is, apps that allow you to add any RSS feed you want. I'm a full-time journalist and blogger, meaning I need to keep up on what's happening-and RSS is how I do that. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. And that is exactly what An Otter RSS is still today! There are plenty of more powerful RSS apps out there if people want something more.All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. That was it □ I wanted just an okay looking RSS reader with minimal functionality. Fancy reading styles (viewing in webview was perfectly fine).Background refreshing with local notifications.Show read/unread status of articles (sync over iCloud).List new articles for each feed (sync over iCloud).Subscribe to RSS feeds (sync over iCloud). ![]() But I did want the app to be free with all the RSS features!Īn Otter RSS doesn’t do much but it does everything I want it to. It’s not much and not functionality that is needed for the app. The in-app payment gets the user my eternal love, alternative app icons, and some new app color themes (coming in a future version). There is an in-app payment for tipping the developer if users want to do so. I don’t want the pressure of having a paid app to make it what users want □♂️ But I do care what users thinking and what so I will take feature requests and bug reports seriously □ I made this app for me! I made it as a learning experience and for something I would personally use. I decided I would take the time in between feedings, cryings, and sleeps (which isn’t much) to prep it for the App Store. I had a weird amount of “free time” since I’m currently on family leave (me and my wife just had our first child). I didn’t want to keep making new betas to fight the expiriation so the App Store seemed like the right path to go. I was still using An Otter RSS every day though! I just didn’t know what I wanted to do with it yet.įast forward to a few weeks ago and my beta app expired □ My users wanted it back and I wanted it back for them. I got consumed by the Shortcuts and the App Store Connect API. I was also building ConnectKit at the time. I let this app sit for a while because I was happy with it. I decided to keep going on this RSS reader and shared it on and got a lot more passionate testers than I expected □ I shared my progress on Twitter and I had a lot of people seem interested in it. I made a quick and dirty prototype that shared a list of feeds and articles in about five hours. It turns out (at that time) I couldn’t find one that I liked. But I did want my feeds to sync between my iPhone, iPad, and Mac. I wasn’t going to be a power user so I wasn’t looking to pay for anything that required a subscription. I’ve never been a big RSS reader but this seemed like the time to get into it. I realized I wanted to keep up with all the blogs I was finding. I was ending reading a lot of Swift and SwiftUI blogs since I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. This app was my first app built completely in SwiftUI. I was developing another app in July of 2020. After five months, I’m finally releasing it to the public! I originally started working on and released the initial beta version of An Otter RSS in August of 2020. Today is the day! It’s been a long time coming.
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