Alternate RSS Reader

For iPhone · iOS 17+

Alternate RSS Reader

A clean, calm RSS reader for headlines on your terms.

Download on the App Store

What you get

Headlines on your terms.

Subscribe to any RSS or Atom feed. Filter the noise, read what's left in a clean, focused view, and let the app refresh quietly in the background.

Clean Reader

Tap any article to see just the body — extracted, restyled in your chosen font size, with dark mode that actually adapts. No nav, no chrome.

Smart Filters

Hide anything matching your keyword list. Tap a feed chip to scope the view, or filter by category pulled straight from each article's tags.

Personal rules

Tailor each feed to your taste. Per-feed text rules and CSS selectors put fine-grained control in your hands.


Your feeds

Every source, side by side.

Subscribe to as many RSS or Atom feeds as you like. Switch between them with a tap on the chip row, or read everything together in one stream. Categories pulled from the feed itself give you a second dimension to slice by — Politics, Tech, Sport, whatever the publisher tagged.

Articles dedupe per feed by their guid, so re-fetches never duplicate the list. Read state survives refreshes.

Reader view

Just the article. Nothing else.

Tap an article and Reader extracts the body — clean typography, smart line length, dark mode that actually adapts. Adjust the size from a four-step Aa stepper that lives in the toolbar.

Per-feed text rules let you tailor what reaches the Reader, so each feed reads the way you want it to.

Fresh + filtered

New headlines while you sleep.

Background refresh pulls fresh items at the interval you choose — every 15 minutes, every hour, or strictly on demand. The app icon badge tells you what's new at a glance, without notifications.

Keyword filters hide stories you don't want to see. Tap Hidden any time to review what was caught and restore individual items with a long-press.


Requirements

Devices
iPhone
iOS
17.0 or later
Network
Internet connection

Privacy

Your feeds. Your data. No one else's.

Alternate RSS Reader is built so the answer to "what does it send?" is "nothing."

What stays on your device

Your subscribed feeds, downloaded articles, read state, keyword filters, per-feed text rules, and view preferences — written to local storage on your iPhone using Apple's SwiftData. None of it is uploaded, synced, or backed up to any server we control.

What we talk to over the network

Only the RSS or Atom feed URLs you have subscribed to, the article pages you tap to open, and a small favicon fetch from Google's public favicon service to display each feed's icon. No analytics endpoints, no telemetry, no remote configuration.

Notifications

The app asks permission once at launch to show a badge on its icon with your unread count. No push notifications are sent — the permission is badge-only.

No accounts, no tracking, no third-party SDKs

There is no sign-up, no user account, and no analytics framework in the app. We do not link to advertisers, identifiers, or third-party data brokers.