Stacks vs Tidings

Stacks is a calm, fully offline reader for the newsletters, blogs, and podcasts you already follow. Add any Substack or RSS feed and Stacks downloads the full articles, images, and podcast episodes to your iPhone so you can read and listen anywhere, even with no signal. On a plane, on the subway, off the grid: nothing buffers, nothing reloads. WHY YOU'LL LIKE IT • Truly offline — full article text, images, and audio are stored on your device for reading and listening with no connection. • A clean, distraction-free reader with adjustable text size, light and dark themes, and a built-in podcast player. • Smart automatic downloading keeps your latest posts ready and manages storage for you. • Fast full-text search across everything you've saved. • Collapsible comment threads, when you want them. PRIVATE BY DESIGN Stacks has no servers of its own, no account, and no analytics. Everything it downloads stays on your device and goes nowhere else. No tracking, no ads. No account is required: just add a feed and pull to refresh. ——— Not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Substack Inc.

Tidings is an RSS reader built for people who want to read, not manage software. Add a feed by pasting any site's URL — it finds the feed for you. Your articles land in one inbox, oldest first, and you triage them: read now, keep for later, star what matters, or sweep the rest away. Nothing is recommended to you, nothing is ranked by an algorithm, and nothing arrives that you didn't ask for. READS BEAUTIFULLY Articles are stripped to their text and images — no popups, no cookie banners, no newsletter modals. Adjustable type, light and dark, and it remembers exactly where you stopped reading, even after you change the font. WORKS OFFLINE Articles are downloaded and cached, so a subway ride or a flight is just reading time. Images come along too. SYNCS PRIVATELY Your feeds and reading state sync across your iPhone and iPad through your own iCloud account. There is no server in the middle, because there is no server at all. BRINGS YOUR FEEDS WITH YOU Import an OPML file from any other reader, and export yours whenever you like. Your subscriptions are yours to take. FEATURES • Automatic feed discovery — paste a site URL, not a feed URL • RSS, Atom, JSON Feed, and YouTube channels • Distraction-free reader with full-text extraction • Offline reading with cached text and images • Inbox, Read Later, and Starred — triage with swipe gestures • Mark Above as Read for fast sweeping • Remembers your place in every list and article • iCloud sync across your devices • OPML import and export • Full VoiceOver and Dynamic Type support • iPhone and iPad FREE FOR UP TO 10 FEEDS Everything above is included — the reader, offline articles, iCloud sync, YouTube feeds, OPML import and export. Nothing is crippled, nothing expires, and there's no trial countdown. If you outgrow 10 feeds, Tidings Premium removes the limit for a single one-time payment. That's the only thing it changes. NO ADS. NO TRACKING. NO ACCOUNT. NO ANALYTICS. NO SUBSCRIPTION. Tidings has no way to know what you read — it has no server to tell.