An RSS and Atom reader for iOS, written in UIKit with no third-party dependencies. Subscribe to feeds, group them into categories, and read one merged timeline, newest first.
- Reads RSS and Atom. One
XMLParserdelegate handles both, pulls a thumbnail out of whichever element the feed happened to use —enclosure,media:content,itunes:image, or the first<img>in the summary — and strips HTML out of the text. - Groups feeds into categories. Read everything at once, one category, or a single feed. Feeds can be renamed, moved between categories, and deleted.
- Tracks what you have read. Unread articles carry a dot and full-strength text; opening one marks it read, swiping toggles it, and the header shows a live unread count.
- Works offline. The last 50 articles per feed are cached on disk, with thumbnails cached in memory and on disk, downsampled before they are stored.
- Ships a feed directory. The Explore tab lists ready-made feeds — BBC, The Guardian, Apple, MIT, NASA, Smithsonian and others — to subscribe to in one tap, so there is something to read before you have typed a single URL.
- Sorts dates that other readers give up on. RSS publishes RFC 822 timestamps, Atom publishes ISO 8601, and real feeds drift from both; the parser tries a list of formats rather than one.
Articles open in a Safari view controller. Pull down to refresh.
Requires Xcode 13 or later and iOS 15.0 or later.
The simulator needs no setup: open RSSReader.xcodeproj, pick a simulator, run.
To run on a real device, supply your own signing Team ID once:
cp Config/Signing.local.xcconfig.example Config/Signing.local.xcconfigthen set LOCAL_DEVELOPMENT_TEAM in that copy. It is gitignored, so no Team ID
is ever committed — project.pbxproj contains none.
No storyboard-heavy architecture and no dependency manager; views are built in
code, and everything is URLSession, XMLParser, and UIKit.
| File | Responsibility |
|---|---|
XML.Parser.swift |
Models (RSSItem, FeedSubscription, FeedCategory, FeedSelection), the XMLParser delegate that reads both RSS and Atom, and publish-date parsing |
FeedStore.swift |
All persistence: the library, the article cache, and read state |
ViewController.swift |
The Today list, RssCell, thumbnail loading, refresh orchestration |
SidebarViewController.swift, SidebarContainerViewController.swift |
Feed selection panel and its slide-in presentation |
SubscriptionManagerViewController.swift |
Library editing |
ExploreViewController.swift |
Built-in feed directory |
Storage is deliberately split by what it would cost to lose:
| What | Where |
|---|---|
| Categories and subscriptions | UserDefaults, key feedCategories |
| Cached articles, 50 per feed | Library/Caches/RSSReaderFeedCache.json |
| Read article identifiers | Library/Application Support/RSSReaderReadArticles.json |
| Article thumbnails | Library/Caches/RSSReaderThumbnails/ |
Losing the caches costs a re-download; losing reading history cannot be undone,
so it lives where iOS will not purge it. DECISIONS.md records the reasoning
behind this and the other choices.
The icon is drawn in code rather than painted, so it can be adjusted without a design tool:
python3 -m pip install Pillow # once
python3 Tools/make_app_icon.pyThat rewrites AppIcon.png in the asset catalog at 1024×1024 with no alpha
channel; Xcode derives every smaller size from it.
A personal project, actively worked on and not published to the App Store. It
does what the list above says and no more — roadmap.md tracks the known gaps,
including an unread-only filter, real tabs, background refresh, and search.