RSS readers help with the structured reading of many news sources: They collect new articles from blogs and news portals in order to display them (optionally sorted by category) in chronological order. The NetNewsWire program has been available for Mac users for 24 years; During its eventful history, it was sometimes developed more, sometimes less intensively. Since 2019, the program returned to the original developer and has been available for free since then. Brent Simmons has big plans for 2026: a new version of the Mac, iPhone and iPad versions optimized for the 26er versions. If you are curious and want to support development with bug reports, you can try out the beta version now. The most outstanding feature of version 7 is certainly the adaptation to Liquid Glass. The Mac version therefore requires macOS 26 (Tahoe). The two sidebars of the program window now use transparency gradients; The large preview area of the selected post also uses floating, semi-transparent controls. However, a lot has also changed in the less visible core of the RSS reader: The new version relies on the revised concurrency framework from Swift 6.2. The move of the user forum is also reflected in the app: In the fall, NetNewsWire switched from the provider Slack to the open source solution Discourse.
NetNewsWire 7 (right) adopts the look and feel of Liquid Glass.
NetNewsWire 6 remains online
If you don’t like the new look or are still working with a previous version of macOS, iOS or iPadOS, you don’t have to do without NetNewsWire: the previous version will continue to be available for download in the future. The third beta is currently available on the GitHub page; Once installed, the integrated updater should also be able to load new versions automatically. Anyone who wants to help with the further development of the version for iPhone and iPad can register for the Testflight program.
Sync currently only works to a limited extent
What makes NetNewsWire particularly worthwhile is that the free reader app allows both the list of subscribed pages and the current reading status via a wide range of synchronization services. One of them is iCloud, which is particularly convenient for Apple users as it does not require an additional user account. If you use Feedly for this purpose, you should wait before installing the beta version – the comparison does not currently work reliably with this service.
