RSS readers for iPhone in 2026: a calm way to follow the news

A news app decides what you see. An RSS reader shows you what the sites you chose have published, in the order they published it, and stops when you reach the end. That is why people who are tired of endless feeds come back to RSS: it has a bottom.

This article compares six RSS readers for iPhone. Glosa, one of the six, is made by the team that writes this blog. We say where the others do things better.

What to look for

Every RSS app fetches feeds and lists new articles. They differ in four places.

Sync. Some apps sync through iCloud, some through their own account, some through a service such as Feedly, Inoreader or Feedbin. If you read on a Mac too, check that both ends speak the same service.

The article view. Many feeds send only a summary. A good reader fetches the full text and strips the page down to words and pictures.

Price. Free apps here are genuinely usable. Subscriptions buy things like keyword tracking, offline caching and read-later services, not the basics.

Moving in and out. Every app on this list reads and writes OPML, the file format that carries a list of feeds from one app to another. If OPML is new to you, our OPML guide explains it in five minutes.

The six apps at a glance

Prices are from the US App Store in October 2026.

App	Price	Sync	Account needed	Best at
NetNewsWire	Free, open source	iCloud, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, FreshRSS and more	No	A plain, fast reader that costs nothing
Reeder	Free, subscription $1.99 a month or $14.99 a year	iCloud	No	One timeline for feeds, videos and podcasts
Unread	Free, Premium $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year	Unread Cloud, Feedbin, Feedly, Inoreader, Miniflux and more	No	Careful typography and read-later services
Feedly	Free, Pro $7.99 a month	Feedly	Yes	Following many sources, keyword tracking
Inoreader	Free, Pro $9.99 a month or $89.99 a year	Inoreader	Yes	Translation, read aloud, filtering rules
Glosa	Free	iCloud	No	Reading each story like a page of a book

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire is free and open source, with nothing behind a paywall. It syncs through iCloud or most of the big feed services, has a clean reader view, folders, and smart lists for Today and All Unread.

It does one job and does it well. If you want a no-cost RSS reader and nothing more, start here.

Reeder

The current Reeder puts feeds, YouTube channels, podcasts and social posts into one timeline that remembers where you stopped. Filters build timelines from keywords or media types. It syncs through iCloud and exports OPML from Settings, under Your Data.

Reeder suits someone who follows a mix of media and likes to scroll one stream.

Unread

Unread is known for its typography and calm themes. It fetches full articles when a feed sends only a summary, and works with a long list of sync services. Premium adds sending articles to read-later apps such as Instapaper or Readwise, caching and custom widgets. It needs iOS 18.

Feedly

Feedly gathers news sites, blogs, YouTube channels, podcasts and Reddit into one account. Pro tracks keywords, brands and companies across sources, which is useful at work and rarely needed for personal reading. You need a Feedly account to use the app.

Inoreader

Inoreader has the most features for heavy readers: rules that filter or tag articles, newsletters by email, offline reading in Pro. It also translates articles and reads them aloud in more than fifty languages, with a daily limit on the free plan. Like Feedly, it needs an account.

Glosa

Glosa is an ebook reader with a News Reader mode. Switch it on in Settings and the app opens on your feeds instead of your bookshelf: today's articles sorted into your folders, unread counts on each, one page of headlines at a time. There is no endless scroll. You read a page, mark it read, and turn to the next.

Each article opens as an e-ink page in greys, with ads and pop-ups gone. You turn pages instead of scrolling, and turning past the last page brings the next article. Because it is the same page as a book, everything the book reader does works here: double-tap a word to see what it means in that sentence, highlight a passage, or have the article read aloud.

Feeds come in three ways: an OPML file (folders kept, podcasts left out and named), a site's name or address (Glosa finds its feeds and estimates how many articles a day each sends), or a list of suggested sites by language and topic. Your feed list syncs through iCloud, and there is no Glosa account.

Glosa is the youngest app on this list. It checks feeds only while it is open, every hour, every three hours or when you pull down, so there is no refresh in the background. It has no keyword rules like Inoreader's, no read-later integrations like Unread's, and no Mac app. It is for reading articles, not for managing hundreds of sources.

Which one to pick

You want free and simple: NetNewsWire.

You follow videos and podcasts as well as sites: Reeder.

You care about typography and send articles to Instapaper or Readwise: Unread.

You track topics for work, or need rules and filters: Inoreader, or Feedly if your team already uses it.

You want to read a few articles a day slowly, without a feed that never ends, and look up words as you go: Glosa.

Getting started with any of them

Export your feeds as OPML from the app you use now, then import the file into the new one. If you are starting from nothing, add five sites you already visit by hand. Most reading habits fail because the feed list is too long, not too short. Keep it to what you can finish in one sitting, and add more when you run out.