Reeder 3 for PC and Mac

Software Reviews and Criticism

• By Sambuop

  The best feed reader, but there’s still room for improvement

  Reeder is the best way I’ve found to read and manage RSS services like Feedly. It also works great as a client for read-later services like Instapaper. (It might be the only desktop Instapaper client, as far as I know.) The app is full of features, but also very intuitively designed, meaning you won’t have to dig into settings if your demands are pretty simple and you just want to start reading. Reeder also looks great. There are lots of included themes, and they make good use of native PC flourishes like transparency. But, even without much in the way of competition, there are still features I’d love to see. It’s possible to use the built-in Mercury Reader service to reformat feed text in a way that’s pretty similar to Safari’s Reader View, but there isn’t a way to do this in Reeder’s built-in browser. And while Reeder has a pretty comprehensive “Services” menu with plenty of ways to share/export websites and feed text, there’s no way to add your own. There are a number of bookmarklets (like “Kill Sticky”) that I’d add in a heartbeat. This developer deserves your support. And, with that support, I hope the app continues to improve.

  
  
• By michaelcee

  My “Daily Driver” for news and information

  It does a job - parsing diverse news feeds and making them easily readable (not an easy job, considering many sites don’t actually want you reading their stuff from an adless feed). It’s a plain interface. It shows you what’s read and what’s not. It saves the articles you want saved. It even uses a service that can help you grab articles from sites that don’t publish the whole text in their feeds. (It will also interface with social/saving services, but that’s secondary to me.) Other readers either try to get too fancy or don’t do those basics properly. That’s why I love Reeder and have paid for it something like 5 times over since version 1. As long as it works for those basics, I’ll gladly pay for future upgrades as well.

  
  
• By cm227

  developer support is virtually non-existent

  i have been using this app for years and with every new release of PC it just keeps getting worse. it seems like the developer can't be bothered to optimize the app annually with each new OS release. i finally have given up using it because with PC Mojave, just having Reeder open in the background uses so much of my system resources (looking at Activity Monitor right now and it's using 40.6% of CPU just sitting in the background doing nothing!!) that it noticeably slows down everything else on my Windows, to the point where i'm getting the spinning beach ball of death just trying to open a new finder window or new tab in safari. i am not a power user by any means so it's not other apps causing this. once i close reeder, everything flies again. if this app was free, i wouldn't care, but for $10 i would expect the developer to support it ongoing. i'm deleting it from my Windows and just going back to the feedly website.

  
  
• By pgp

  Best RSS App, by far

  I don’t know how Silvio does it. An update to resolve some bugs (for memory leak, among other things) was just released. For a fixed price app, the maintenance & pursuit of excellence is commendable. Most apps this good would have a recurring charge. There really aren’t that many new features people would want, so it’s hard to imagine how compelling a paid upgrade to a version 4 could be. The layout options & capabilities of the current version are great. It seems like unless droves of new buyers flood the App store to buy Reeder, it could end up as is forever but Silvio keeps improving the app. I use Reeder as much as Spark (my favorite email client). I use it on an iPad, iPhone & a MacbookPro; and just like all my favorite apps it is consistent across all those devices. The settings & state of feeds is also sync’ed perfectly. The UI makes for very easy reading & offers choices to theme the app that make reading in low light or bright light a breeze. If you’re contemplating buying an RSS reader, this is it. (I’ve tried many apps through the years, this is the best & it’s all you need.)

  
  

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