I use Reeder, and have for years. So when the new version started picking up angry reviews I was curious what people were actually mad about — not the usual app-store noise, the real pattern underneath it. I pulled around 250 recent App Store reviews, kept the 122 that were 3 stars or under and had an actual complaint in them, and sorted them into buckets. I figured the gripes would be all over the place. They weren't.
The short version
The new Reeder dropped read/unread states in favour of a timeline. For a lot of long-time users that isn't a smaller feature set — it's a different app. About 45 of the 122 complaints come back to that one decision. Nothing else is close.
And the people raising it aren't leaving quietly. They name the app they're switching to, and a surprising number say they'll come back and pay again if read states return. That's the part I found interesting. It's a churn problem with the exit clearly marked — you don't see that often.
Everything else (bloated layout, the subscription, some bugs) is real, but it's secondary, and most of it just makes the same wound worse.
1. No read/unread states (~45 complaints)
The core complaint is simple: you can't tell what you've already read. Articles don't dim or disappear once you've seen them, the same stuff shows up on every refresh, and there's no unread-only view and no per-feed counts. People who used to clear 80 feeds before their coffee went cold now describe an endless scroll with no finish line.
"having 100+ articles and no read states is impossible to deal with. Please give us the OPTION to toggle on read states."
"Reeder classic allowed me to go through 80 feeds/day in under 30 minutes… That's all gone now. I can't tell what I have already read, so the timeline just becomes a clutter."
"It's like a mail app where you can't delete or archive emails!"
Read state is kind of the whole point of RSS. It's the difference between processing your feeds and just scrolling a website. And the people hit hardest here are the ones who've bought every version going back a decade — several mention they pre-paid the subscription mostly to support the developer. The ask in almost every one of these reviews is the same, and it's modest: just give us the option to turn it back on.
2. Less on screen, worse navigation (~30 complaints)
Second bucket: the new list is bloated. Tall rows, big images, avatars, and no setting to tighten any of it. One person counts 7 stories where the old app fit 15.
"Control over the headlines size and preview length is MIA, meaning I can now only see 7 stories at a time as opposed to 15 on the old app."
"Keyboard navigation is shockingly bad for an RSS reader. There is no clear 'Next Unread' command… no way to mark all articles in a tag as unread."
Also gone, or buried: keyboard "next unread", swipe to next article, open-in-browser, dropping a feed into a folder when you add it. The thing about all of these is the old app did them well, so each one reads as something taken away rather than just missing. That stings a lot more than a feature that was never there.
3. The subscription, and a paywall that shoots itself in the foot (~20 complaints)
Reeder used to be a one-time purchase, so the move to a subscription lands badly for a chunk of people on principle. But the detail that jumped out at me was what's behind the paywall: a 10-feed cap, and OPML import. You can't bring your existing feeds in without paying.
"Can't have more than 10 feeds or import from another source without paying? How am I supposed to migrate to this from another app?"
"The inability to import feeds without a subscription makes this no go for me… no one is going to want to try switching from another app if you add friction to the process."
Gating import is the strange one. It blocks the exact thing someone has to do to find out whether the app is worth subscribing to in the first place. A few reviewers basically say they'd happily pay for something good — what gets them is paying to lift a limit the app invented.
4. Bugs, including a current-macOS one (~12 complaints)
Smaller pile, but worth flagging: slow refreshes (10–20 seconds, sometimes worse), a blank screen since the "liquid glass" update, and one specific, reproducible bug on macOS Tahoe 26 where feeds keep disappearing.
"It's really not compatible with macOS Tahoe 26. I have to constantly reload or quit and restart the app for it to show all the feeds. They keep disappearing… Other readers (ReadKit, News Explorer, etc.) have no such problem with Tahoe."
A bug that only hits the current OS, that competitors don't have, is the kind of thing that quietly makes people wonder whether anyone's still working on the app. That sentiment runs under a lot of these reviews.
A few other things I noticed
- The corpus reads less like abandonment and more like a loyal base that wants to come back. People keep writing long, constructive reviews and offering to re-subscribe the day read states return.
- The competitors are named and specific: NetNewsWire, Feedbin, Feedly, ReadKit, News Explorer — and most often, Reeder Classic itself.
- Two separate reviewers said they'd just get an AI ("Claude Code", ChatGPT) to build or explain a reader for them instead. First time I've seen that show up as a real substitute for a paid app in reviews.
- The headline new feature — pulling in YouTube, Bluesky, Mastodon — has its own bugs (the YouTube player dying after a couple uses, Mastodon verification failing). The thing meant to justify the rebuild is part of what people are unhappy with.
How I did this, and where it's rough
~250 recent Reeder reviews from the public App Store RSS feed, kept the 122 that were ≤3★ with an actual complaint, sorted by theme. The counts are approximate — plenty of reviews complain about two or three things at once, and I filed each under its main gripe. If I counted every mention, the read-states number goes up, not down. A handful of non-English and one-word reviews are in the total but didn't get a bucket. So treat the numbers as directional. The one-decision concentration is obvious enough in the raw text that I don't think the fuzziness changes the picture.
I do this kind of thing for fun — taking a pile of reviews and pulling out the few problems that actually matter, with the real quotes attached. I've been turning it into a tool at useverbatim.app, but there's nothing to buy here. I just thought the Reeder pattern was worth writing down.