I Built My Own RSS Reader

On March 19 I made the first commit to a small Mac app that reads RSS and Atom feeds. I wanted one thing from it: open a window, see what the people I follow have written, and read it. No account, no sync service, no algorithm deciding what I see first. Six months and around eighty commits later, it runs on the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. The rules I set three rules on day one, and they have held up. No third-party dependencies. Foundation’s XMLParser handles RSS 2.0 and Atom fine. WebKit renders articles. SQLite stores them. Everything else is SwiftUI. Nothing to audit, nothing to update on a Tuesday because a transitive package broke. Everything stays local. Feeds and articles are cached in SQLite on the device. Read state lives in preferences. The app talks to the feeds you add and to nothing else. Native, not “cross-platform”. It looks and behaves like a Mac app on the Mac and like an iPhone app on the iPhone, because it uses the system’s own controls everywhere. It started as a…