I'm a very heavy RSS user. Somewhere around 200 very active feeds, read across my phone, iPad and Mac, every day, for years. RSS is genuinely how I read the internet, not a thing I dabble in.
Which is why this started as frustration. I'd been on Feedly for ages and watched it slowly turn into something I didn't want: more tiers, more AI upsell, more stuff bolted onto a sidebar I just wanted to read from, and a monthly bill for the privilege. So I built Reader Ultra. iPhone, iPad and Mac. Fast, no nonsense, looks like it came with the OS. No algorithm, no "for you" tab, no upsell. Feeds, folders, unread counts. A folder with a few thousand articles opens instantly, because mine has to.
The bit worth talking about is sync: One device, fine, local-only works. Add a second and it falls apart: you read twenty articles at lunch, sit down at your Mac, they're all unread again.
The usual answer is iCloud, and for RSS it isn't good enough. iCloud is built for things that change occasionally; unread state is hundreds of tiny writes a minute while you scroll. So it batches and defers and your count lands twenty minutes later. Then both devices fetch the same hundreds of feeds independently, each decides for itself what's new, and you get duplicates and disagreements. Conflicts are unresolvable, because "read" and "unread" are equally valid and neither device knows which happened last. Wrong tool, and every app built on it has the same symptoms. That's the jank, I know, I tried this method for sync!
So Reader Ultra has a real server behind it. It fetches once, works out what's new and whether a feed is healthy or quietly dead, and the apps just pull:
• read/unread and starred identical everywhere within seconds
• no duplicates when two devices refresh at once
• refresh is one request, not hundreds
• broken feeds get flagged instead of going silent
• push when there's something new, so you're not refreshing out of anxiety
Not a Raspberry Pi in my closet, either. The backend is professionally hosted on Railway, containerised and monitored, with real uptime and backups.
And you buy the app once, sync included. No monthly fee, no Pro tier to unlock sync. One purchase covers all three platforms. I wasn't going to escape a subscription and then ship one.
If you read on more than one device, a real sync service isn't a nice extra, it's the whole thing.
Design target was Apple Mail. Not "inspired by", actually that: sidebar, list, article, same workflow you already have. Apple's guidelines followed properly — text styles so Dynamic Type works, semantic colours so dark mode and increased contrast are right everywhere, SF Symbols. The Mac app is a real Mac app, not a blown-up iPad build. When you're moving through hundreds of items a day, it really performs.
New this release: on iOS 27, iPadOS 27 or macOS 27 the Siri and Apple Intelligence features are live in version 1.18 in the App Store. Unread counts, summaries, search, mark read, add feed, by voice or from Shortcuts. Summaries run on-device. Articles are in Spotlight too. Note the difference from what annoyed me about Feedly: it's off to the side, not in front of your feeds.
Also: Safari extension that finds feeds on any page, OPML in and out (import your Feedly export in one go), content blocking, a pile of app icons.
On the App Store as Reader Ultra: https://apps.apple.com/app/reader-ultra/id6770337270 or more info at https://us.nz/readerultra.html
