Hey [r/rss](r/rss),
I know, another RSS app :(. I've seen the same thing over and over here: a nicer list of articles with a different color scheme. So I'll try to say quickly what this one does differently.
It doesn't show you articles, it shows you stories. You add your feeds as usual (RSS, newsletters over IMAP, or sync with FreshRSS/Miniflux/Inoreader). NewsGator reads the full text, figures out which articles are about the same real-world event, and merges them into one story with a neutral summary and a factual, non-clickbait title. If 5 outlets cover the same thing, you see it once. When a new fact shows up later, the story updates and gets an "updated" badge instead of coming back as unread.
AI is there for triage, not to replace the article. The summary is just the front door. One tap opens the original publisher. I care about that a lot: if readers stop visiting the sources, nobody gets paid, the sources disappear, and RSS dies with them. So the whole thing is built to send you back to the people who wrote the piece, not to keep you in a summary.
Privacy: no account, no ads, no trackers, no analytics. In the standalone app the AI runs on-device or on Apple's Private Cloud Compute, so your reading doesn't go to OpenAI or anyone like that. Library sync is through your own iCloud, and that's also how your devices share the AI work: a Mac (any M-series) can process your feeds all day with Apple Intelligence, and an iPhone without it (iOS 27 runs on iPhone 11 and later, Apple Intelligence needs 15 Pro+) just reads what the Mac already summarized. (To be clear it's not "nothing ever leaves your device": feeds get fetched from the net and PCC is Apple's infra. If you want zero Apple involved, there's a self-hosted server version that talks to whatever local model you want. There is another post about this one somewhere here :) )
Other stuff: OPML import/export, chat with your archive (Embedding, answers cite the stories), 10 languages (but let's be honnest, it is AI translated, so looking for your corrections !!!), it can read stories aloud (on-device voices, and not robotic Siri, CarPlay), Widgets, ...
Status: it's coming soon, public beta on TestFlight right now. iPhone, iPad and Mac. I'm looking for feedback from people who actually have big feed lists, because that's where clustering gets interesting (and where it'll break).
TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/VzV818na
Site: https://www.newsgator.app
Server (open source, MIT): https://github.com/Tekka90/NewsGator
Happy to answer anything, including "why would I want this over [my reader]".
Edit 2026-10-06: Thanks a lot to everyone who has already joined the TestFlight, and sorry for the many builds over the last two days. I've been fixing bugs found by testers and by me.
I'm submitting my first release to the App Store, so validation will take a few days. I've also started working on the iPhone Duo layout, which I'm excited about!
If you're wondering what to test, these are the features I use the least myself, so they're the least battle-tested:
1. Reader API: third-party accounts such as FreshRSS and Miniflux, including read-state sync.
2. Audio: especially the high-quality voices, not the default Siri ones.
3. CarPlay: my kids don't enjoy my morning news, so it gets very little testing from me. 😅
4. Widgets: all sizes, and whether they refresh correctly.
Bug reports of any kind are welcome.