Skim Reader vs PetalFeed

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.

An RSS reader built for VoiceOver from day one. Follow blogs, Reddit, Mastodon, Bluesky and YouTube in one place, then listen to it all like a personal news broadcast. No ads, no tracking, no subscription. Every screen is fully labeled for VoiceOver, every swipe has a named custom action, related details are grouped so you hear them in one stop, and all text scales with Dynamic Type. Follow everything you read: - RSS and Atom feeds from any blog or news site - Subreddits, just by name - Your Mastodon and Bluesky timelines - YouTube channels, with videos that play right inside the app - A Discover tab of hand-picked feeds, subreddits and channels by topic Listen hands-free. Have any article, or a whole queue of them, read aloud in any voice installed on your device. Control playback from the Lock Screen, Control Center or the mini player that follows you through the app. The Hive turns your headlines into a short podcast-style show, written by Apple Intelligence and read aloud by distinct voices. Hawk Eye gives you a digest of the topics in your unread articles. Summaries give you the gist of any article in a few sentences. All of it runs privately on your device. Stay organized your way: - Petals are your feeds, Flowers are your folders - Smart Flowers fill themselves using rules you set - Bees filter out keywords, spoilers and topics you would rather skip - Similar articles are grouped, so one story is one stop - Rapid Review lets you triage a busy feed one card at a time - Full-text extraction gives you the whole article without the clutter Bring your library with you. Sync feeds, folders and read state two ways with Feedbin, Inoreader, FreshRSS or Miniflux, or import and export OPML anytime. Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets show your unread counts and latest headlines. Siri and Shortcuts can open an article, read your unread articles aloud, play The Hive, build a Hawk Eye digest or mark everything read. PetalFeed works on iPhone, iPad and Mac. Free 14-day trial, then one-time purchase. Free forever, even after the trial: - Reading RSS and Atom feeds - OPML import and export - Up to 10 Petals - Text-to-speech read aloud - Every accessibility feature PetalFeed Lifetime is a single purchase with no renewals. It unlocks: - Unlimited Petals - Sync with Feedbin, Inoreader, FreshRSS and Miniflux - The Hive, Hawk Eye and summaries - Bees and Smart Flowers - Widgets, Siri and Shortcuts - Refresh as often as every 5 minutes Already bought PetalFeed? You keep everything automatically. Enjoying it? An optional tip jar lets you say thanks. Private by design. Your feeds, articles and reading history stay on your device. All AI runs on the device: no servers, no PetalFeed account, no tracking, no ads. Sync happens only with a service you choose to connect, and your sign-in details stay in the device Keychain. AI features require an Apple Intelligence–capable device.