Every few years someone declares RSS dead, and every few years it keeps quietly powering podcasts, newsletters, and the reading habits of people who want to choose what they see.

Google killed their Google Reader app in 2013. Many thought that was the death blow for RSS. But in Readers place popped up many worthy replacements - Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, NewsBlur, and many, many more. Social Media was supposed to kill RSS as a medium, but it just keeps on chugging along.

You choose the inputs

A feed reader is the inverse of a social timeline. Instead of an algorithm deciding what you see, you decide: subscribe to a site and you get everything it publishes, in order, with nothing inserted between the items. Unsubscribe and it’s gone. That’s the entire model, and it’s why it has aged so well.

It’s a protocol, not a platform

RSS doesn’t belong to a company. It can’t be acquired, enshittified, or shut down in a pivot. A feed published in 2004 still parses today, and a feed published today will still parse in 2046. Very little software can make that claim.

The web is still full of feeds

Nearly every blog, news site, podcast, and release page publishes a feed - even when there’s no orange icon in sight. (This site’s feed lives at /rss.xml.) Once you start looking, you can route almost everything you read through one calm, chronological inbox.

That’s why we built uRSS

We think the best reading experience on a phone is a fast, native one. uRSS is our take: a focused RSS reader for iOS with no accounts, no sync lock-in, and no algorithm. Your feeds, your order, your attention.