There are so many iOS RSS readers on the App Store to choose from, that it’s often hard to find one that is really great. However, Fiery Feeds 2 is that great RSS feeder that both looks good, and has features that will satisfy power users of RSS feeds. Fiery Feeds 2 is my favourite RSS client on iOS, and it’s a great choice for those who want a powerful and customisable RSS client.
Firstly, Fiery Feeds is a subscription based app – it’s £9.99 a year to unlock all the features the app has to offer, however the free version will please most people. It’s also handy as you can test out the basic features of the app to see if you like them before purchasing it.
Fiery Feeds allows you to connect to your RSS client, such as Feedly or Inoreader, and then syncs the new articles to the app. Fiery Feeds also supports read later services such as Instapaper and Pocket, which allows you to save the article for later in the service you use if you don’t want to read it when it appears on your feed.
It shows your article folders, smart view (I’ll go into these in a bit) and other things such as multiple articles in a panel, with each option showing how many articles are in each folder. Tapping on the amount of articles expands a list view of from what publication those unread articles are from, and this is one of my favourite features of Fiery Feeds as it lets you quickly get to a feed, and filter down your folders easily.
Smart views, as briefly mentioned above, are a great feature of the app. These views show you a cut down view of your feed. Hot links shows a list of links that are trending at the moment, and that other people are reading. High frequency shows you publications that post a lot, and low frequency shows you publications that don’t post often. I especially like the latter one as often I want to read a low-frequency site more than a high-frequency one.
A major feature of Fiery Feeds is full text extraction. The great thing about Fiery Feeds is that it lets you choose different text extraction services, so if the full text was not extracted with one service, you can use a different one in order to fix the issue. If you don’t know what full text extraction is, it’s pretty simple. Many RSS feeds, including this sites one, cut the text the feed shows down with a ‘Read more’ link in them that takes you to the site. Full text extraction pulls the text from the website, so you automatically see the full text of the article that you have subscribed to. It’s a really great feature that every RSS app should have. You can check out the difference below.
One big advantage of Fiery Feeds is the ability to customise the app, and almost everything you see with the app is customisable. You can change the font, the text size, the icon, and so much more, so your RSS reading experience is totally tailored to you. For power users, the app includes an ‘Expert Settings’ area that lets you totally customise your feed experience. iPad users with an external keyboard, Fiery Feeds also includes keyboard shortcuts which is a nice touch.
Fiery Feeds also allows you to manage your feeds directly inside the app, including unsubscribing, renaming and moving feeds. The app allows you to easily mark articles that are over a certain amount old as read, along with the ability to mark articles above a certain one as read.
In conclusion, Fiery Feeds is the best RSS app I’ve used on the App Store. It has the perfect balance between being customisable but being usable, and I love the ability to view full articles instead of truncated ones, and the all folders view is very easy to use and works great for me.
Fiery Feeds is available on the App Store for free, with a £9.99 subscription each year (free trial available).
