Many of my daily digital habits have changed over the past decade and change, but one has not: I still check an RSS app to see what’s new at a couple of dozen sites. Even as the social-media and news landscapes have gone through multiple cycles of destruction and reinvention, the standard originally called Really Simple Syndication remains one of my preferred ways to know when a favorite site has published new posts.
The core advantages of RSS (which you may find easier to call “Web feeds” if you’re trying to cut back on tech abbrevations) remain unchanged from what I wrote here in 2015:
One is control: my RSS feed only shows the sites I’ve added, not somebody else’s idea of what I should know. Another is what I’ll call a tolerance of time: A site that only posts an update a week is less likely to get lost when it occupies its own folder in the defined space of my RSS feed.
The third, maybe most important feature: Nobody owns RSS.
That last angle allowed me to move on from Google’s capricious decision to kill its Google Reader RSS service–on a scale of that company’s faceplants, it’s up there with Google Glass–and switch to Feedly’s RSS platform.
The individual apps I use on my various devices, however, have changed a bit since then.
My favorite among them is the free and open-source NetNewsWire–the iPad version of Brent Simmons’ labor of love more so than the Mac edition. On my tablet, this app displays a simple count of unread articles (which, sadly but typically enough, is once again near triple digits as I write this) and lets me read each one in full without switching to Safari. On my desktop, NNW also displays that app-icon badge count but requires a switch to Safari to read a new post if the site, like most, doesn’t publish a full-text RSS feed–meaning I’m taken out of my reading workflow and then have yet another tab to remember to read and then close.
On my Pixel 5a phone, I use Feedly’s Android app. The free version stuffs some ads into feeds, which I don’t mind all that much since they’re so easy to skip, and it does let me read entire posts in its built-in browser instead of requiring a switch to Chrome. But Feedly’s app doesn’t even try to support Android’s notifications system (if only that OS feature supported not just adding a colored dot to an app icon to indicate new content but a count of unread items as iOS does), so it’s too easy to ignore its green icon on my home screen.
On Windows, I have a different problem: NextGen Reader, a fave of critics in the previous decade, still works fine–with the convenient feature of an unread-articles count on its taskbar button, but without in-app reading of original posts–but also appears completely abandoned. A decade after its debut in the Microsoft Store, it’s gone from that app market, its Twitter account has been silent since February of 2021, and the developers’ site now redirects to a generic parked-domain page.
And the other Windows RSS apps that I’d considered before settling on NextGen five years ago look equally moribund. So I don’t know what I’ll do if this apparently fossilized Windows app stops working–except, perhaps, reach for my iPad instead.
5/6/2021: 
Rob Pegoraro 