First of all, I just wanted to say thank you to the people at VVCMac for trying out my app, and leaving a very favorable review. You can read it here..
I was very nervous when the auditor from VVMac told me that they were going to review my app. After weeks of waiting, they finally posted the review and I’m so nervous I almost vomited. Anyway, you can read the translation below, since the website is in French.
- Note: This was translated using ChatGPT 5.4 Pro, I apologize in advance if some words are wrong.
Ember Feed 1.7, elegance, simplicity, and iCloud sync Ember Feed is a more conventional RSS reader than Flux. It gets the job done, nothing more. Its strength is that it wraps itself in a modern, elegant interface, though it does not reinvent the category in any way. In practice, nearly all RSS readers, except for a few rare cases like Flux, are built the same way from left to right: sources and feeds, then articles, then the reader itself.
Ember Feed supports the system display modes: light, dark, and automatic. It also offers gradient themes in soft, pleasant pastel colors, without going overboard with absurd Liquid Glass effects. Everything is perfectly readable here. Around twenty fonts are available, and you can even change the font for each article shown in the reader, independently from the global font selected in Settings. One section of the settings is dedicated to code blocks, including their appearance, font, and font size.
Ember Feed uses the traditional three-panel interface found in mail clients, note-taking apps, content managers, and of course RSS readers. It is simple, but pleasant and elegant, and offers a few good customization options that are subtle and genuinely useful.
There is not much point in exploring the app’s menus, since you will find only the basic commands that any macOS app is expected to provide at minimum, including some that are not especially useful for this kind of app. For now, Ember Feed does not offer many options beyond what is needed to make it comfortable to use, such as interface customization, notifications, and synchronization.
To get started, since I could not find any option to connect the app to a feed aggregator like Feedly, the easiest route is to import an OPML file. If you do not have one, you have to enter URLs manually. Fortunately, you do not need to know the exact RSS feed addresses. For example, if you enter the homepage URL of Le Figaro or Le Monde, Ember Feed will display the RSS URLs it finds.
I can also export my data in OPML format if I want to switch apps. The export option is not in the app’s menus, but can be found in Settings > Account > Data. The interface for adding a new RSS feed in Ember Feed could still use a little more polish, given the quality of the rest of the interface. By escaping social network algorithms, you get back, as Ember Feed developer Lawrence Gimenez says, a clean and strictly chronological stream of sources you appreciate and trust.
Ember Feed is also very restrained when it comes to AI, offering only support for Apple Intelligence’s standard Writing Tools module. Unfortunately, this is fairly useless. On one hand, many feeds show only the title and an introduction. On the other hand, when the RSS feed includes the full article, Ember Feed can only select one paragraph at a time, making it impossible to ask Apple’s AI to generate a summary or extract key points.
For me, this text-selection issue is a major problem that should be fixed in a very near future version.
Ember Feed also offers iCloud synchronization for the main data, making it easier to read feeds on Mac, iPhone, and iPad. Thanks to iCloud support, the app syncs feeds, their folder organization, and reading progress across all devices using the same Apple account where the app is installed.
The app is available on macOS, iOS, and iPadOS as a single inexpensive purchase. Articles are cached on each device, so they can still be read offline, and synchronization resumes as soon as network access is available again.
Overall, the app is well designed and pleasant to use. It is especially enjoyable on iPhone. For example, its reader mode can display articles from the site Mac4Ever, though without images, whereas most other RSS apps do not and instead send the user to either their built-in browser or the user’s preferred external browser.
The text-selection issue still needs to be fixed, and some interfaces, such as the one for adding RSS feeds, should be revised because they do not feel “Mac-like” enough to my taste. That said, the developer is probably using Apple’s tools that make it easier to build apps for all platforms. Even so, this stands in too sharp a contrast with the quality of the main window.
A few lingering bugs also need to be fixed. For example, on both Mac and mobile, the filtering menu for all, read, and unread does not actually filter anything. For now, in addition to Flux for moments when I have time to devote to reading, I am still hesitating between staying with NetNewsWire for quick browsing or switching to Ember Feed. Perhaps Ember Feed will win me over once its little issues have been ironed out.
I really appreciate the favorable overall review. This app is a labor of love for me and my wife. We can’t really work on this app full time, since we both have day jobs and a toddler to take care of. But, we will always keep this app alive and updated.
In fact, there is so much stuffs to implement in the pipeline. For me, v1.8 (which is currently in review by Apple) is the best release so far.