NetNewsWire Status: Progress Toward Shipping the iOS App

The team — we have a team! which you can join! — is continuing to work on several different things: NetNewsWire 5.0.4 for Mac, NetNewsWire 5.1 for Mac, and NetNewsWire 5.0 for iOS. We’re also figuring out what will go in subsequent releases.

The most attention has been going to the iOS app. We’ll be doing a public TestFlight beta as soon as it’s ready, which I’ll announce here and on the NetNewsWire blog. It’s getting close! A bunch of us have been using it every day for a while now.

In second place for attention is syncing with Feedly, which will appear in the iOS app and in NetNewsWire 5.1 for Mac. (We’re working on adding other services too, but it’s yet to be decided which ones will appear in which versions.)

No ETAs, of course — we’ll announce dates only when we know them for sure.

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The design of the iOS app is what you’d expect, I hope. As NetNewsWire for Mac is so very much a Mac app, the iOS app is very much an iOS app.

Our design goals are the same as with the Mac app: make it stable, fast, clean, modern, and — most importantly — as obvious as possible, which helps make it easy to learn and use.

In other words, we did what we always do, which is to do the best job we can by using classic user interface design principles.

It definitely looks like an iOS 13 app. You can see its bones.

While I think it’s awesome, people who prefer something richer have other really great apps to choose from. We know NetNewsWire is not the only RSS reader, and we’re not trying to please everyone. Which is very freeing — it means we can please the people who like apps like this. :)