Feed Drum vs Skim Reader
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side โ with what reviewers say about each.
Feed Drum
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Feed Drum is a modern take on news and feed readers. With its modern and simplistic design, Feed Drum brings all your news sources to one place. You are in control of your news feed. With Feed Drum, you can select from a catalog of reputed news sources to be shown on your feed, minimizing distractions. Beyond that, Feed Drum offers you the ability to create multiple groups with sources you select so that you can create your own custom feeds on different interests and topics. With its simple and intuitive design, Feed Drum is the better way to get your news and keep up to date on topics you care about.
Skim Reader
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Skim Reader: Read Smarter, Not Longer In a world of infinite scroll and endless content, your time is the ultimate currency. Skim Reader is the RSS reader that respects it. The Problem With Modern Reading You subscribe to 30 feeds. You have 200 unread articles. You have 10 minutes. What do you do? Skip everything? Skim headlines and miss the insights buried in paragraph seven? Feel guilty about the growing unread count? There's a better way. One Slider. Infinite Control. Skim Reader introduces something no RSS reader has done before: a compression slider that transforms any article to match exactly how much time you have. Drag left for a two-sentence summary. Drag right for the full article. Stop anywhere in between. It's that simple. - Glance: The headline in 10 seconds - Brief: Key points in 30 seconds - Summary: Main ideas in 2 minutes - Digest: Detailed overview in 5 minutes - Full: The complete article Every position is generated by on-device AI. No cloud. No subscriptions. No data leaving your phone. AI That Lives on Your Device Skim Reader runs a state-of-the-art language model entirely on your iPhone or iPad. Your articles stay private. The first time you open the app, you'll download a ~1GB AI model. After that, everything runs locally. Your reading habits are yours alone. It Learns How You Read Notice how you always want the full article from The New York Times but just the brief from tech blogs? Skim Reader notices too. The app quietly learns your preferences - by feed, by time of day, by habit. Open an article at 7am during your commute? It remembers you prefer Brief. Saturday morning deep-dive? It knows you want Full. You can disable this entirely in settings. But once you experience an app that just knows, you won't want to. Beautiful Typography, Zero Compromise Reading apps should be beautiful. Skim Reader uses carefully chosen typefaces optimised for extended reading: - New York for headlines - editorial elegance - Charter for body text - designed for screens - Your choice of fonts and sizes - Bionic Reading mode for faster scanning - Light and dark themes that don't strain your eyes Features That Matter - Add any RSS or Atom feed - paste a URL and it finds the feed - Full article extraction - even when feeds only provide snippets - Swipe gestures - mark read, bookmark, delete - All Articles view - see everything in one stream - Bookmarks - save articles for later - Pull to refresh - stay current - Open in browser - when you need the original - Haptic feedback - feel the slider snap into position No Subscriptions. No Ads. No Tracking. Skim Reader is free. No monthly fees. No "premium tiers." No advertisements. No analytics watching what you read. Who Is This For? - Professionals who need to stay informed but don't have time to read everything - Researchers managing dozens of sources - News enthusiasts who want depth without the time commitment - Anyone tired of the "mark all as read" guilt spiral - People who believe reading should be a choice, not an obligation The TL;DR for a Doomscrolling World I built Skim Reader because I was drowning in content. Every day, more articles. Every day, less time. I wanted a reader that adapted to me, not the other way around. Now I read more than ever - because I can finally read at the right depth for every article. Some get 10 seconds. Some get 10 minutes. Every one gets exactly what it deserves. Your time is valuable. Read accordingly.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is ads: Skim Reader at none against Feed Drum's shown. Feed Drum's advantage is update cadence (weekly vs monthly) and iOS requirement (18.0 vs 26.0). On price, in-app purchases and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Neither carries in-app purchases, so what you see is what you pay.
Feed Drum ships an update weekly, Skim Reader monthly. The most recent releases landed on October 12, 2026 and October 8, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Feed Drum | Skim Reader |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Weekly โ better | Monthly |
| Ads | Yes | No โ better |
| In-app purchases | No | No |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 18.0 โ better | 26.0 |
| Further details โ not scored | ||
| Size | 23 MB | 12 MB |
| Age rating | 12+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Ravindu Wataketiya | Lucas Young |
In-app purchases
Feed Drum
No in-app purchases
Skim Reader
No in-app purchases









