Mac and iPhone: the article list with its thumbnails, and an article open on each.
An RSS reader that has been sold twice and is better for it is rare enough to be a story on its own. Version 5.0 is about the small pictures.
Unread was Jared Sinclair’s in 2014 — an iPhone reader built for the post-Google-Reader scramble, driven by what MacStories called “sloppy gestures” that needed no precision or buttons, with a custom share sheet before iOS had one. Sinclair sold it to Supertop, the makers of Castro; Supertop sold it to John Brayton’s Golden Hill Software in 2017. Brayton kept the essence — typography, colour themes, an article list you can drive with a thumb — and built outward: an iPad version, a native AppKit Mac app, a free Unread Cloud syncing service, Shortcuts that run on individual articles, and last year logins for paywalled sites so their articles render inside the app. MacStories gave it the 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award for exactly that: an acquired indie app that did not rot.
Version 5.0, out September 12, is mostly about thumbnails, and the thinking is more careful than the word suggests. Earlier versions cropped to the centre and cut as little as possible. Now Unread looks for faces, animals, text and other salient regions and crops to keep them, so a tall photo with a face near the top yields a thumbnail with the face in it. When nothing can be cut without losing something important, it detects that and pads the picture into a frame of the right shape instead. When the thumbnail is small and there is one small point of focus, it zooms in — a photo of one person becomes a recognisable face in a compact iPhone list, a narrow Mac list pane, or a widget. A related fix: an image a feed service attaches to every article on a site, a masthead in effect, is now ignored, which needed a small server-side component and a new section in the privacy policy, and Brayton says so.
The other headline is syncing. FreshRSS and Miniflux, both self-hosted, could already be reached through their Fever API; 5.0 adds proper accounts (FreshRSS via its Google Reader API, Miniflux via REST), which is what lets you subscribe, unsubscribe, organise feeds, mark read on scroll and mark everything above or below an article as read from inside Unread. There is also a quick way to mark old articles read.
Unread is a free download; Premium — $4.99 a month or $29.99 a year — adds article actions to Instapaper, Readwise, Raindrop and the rest, Shortcuts, save-to-Unread, ahead-of-time caching and custom icons. iPhone, iPad and Mac; 4.6 stars from 438 App Store ratings as of this writing.