lire: RSS Reader

This app was my favorite RSS reader supporting iCloud sync for quite a long time. Sometime in the past month or two, it has turned into a bloody mess. It almost always crashes on launch and then will launch on the next attempt. Navigating to feeds frequently results in a different feed showing. Or the right feed showing under the wrong feed’s heading. Sometimes articles simply won’t open but change from unread to read. Sometimes it overlays multiple section headers overtop of themselves making them appear as a jumble of overlaid text. Just insane behavior! Happening on multiple devices even after reinstalls. I thought it was a bug that would get fixed quickly but it has been at least 45 days since these issues started. Looking for a new client now.

I found this app after scouring Reddit for an RSS reader with proper support for Miniflux. Buried in one thread was a mention of lire. I was a bit reluctant to try it with no trial on iOS and a macOS demo that didn’t support Miniflux; but I thought why not, it’s 10 bucks, recently updated, and looks nice. I’m incredibly happy that I did. It is performant. I love the full text caching. The integration with Miniflux is solid and was easy to set up. It feels like an iOS app should. Say what you will about Liquid Glass, I enjoy the design of lire quite a bit more than the myriad of other readers I have tried. I’m surprised to not see more buzz about this reader. In a world full of apps with subscriptions, it is very important to me to support developers that provide perpetual licenses. As a developer myself, I understand why many have switched to subscription models. That just makes it more important to vote with our wallets ;) One thing I’d love to see in the future would be tighter integration with feeds that provide multiple URLs. For instance, hacker news feeds provide an article url and a comment url. On the Miniflux web UI I can click the comment URL via a link on the article row. I’d love to have something similar in lire as a convenience, not a show stopper since I can just go to the feed view to click the URL. Thanks for this great app!

I’ve been using Reeder on all of my Apple devices, so it’s been a real bummer to not be able to read all of the news on my self-hosted FreshRSS host after I got my shiny new Apple Vision Pro. I gave it a few weeks and there’s still no Reeder option here, so I did a search for “freshrss” to see if any apps claimed support. This is *not* a native app, but unlike Reeder, it *is* compatible as an iPad app. Going for 4 stars now because most of what I need out of a reader is here. Deduction of 1 until there’s a native app for the platform.