Byline 5 vs RSS News Ticker
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both apps, side by side — with what reviewers say about each.
Byline 5
Access your favorite news sources and blogs, even without an internet connection. Subscribe to thousands of RSS feeds and stay updated with automatic syncing across all your devices. Enjoy a streamlined reading experience with offline access and quick navigation.
- Offline reading with cached content
- Syncs across devices and web
- Quick article navigation
- Background app refresh for syncing
- Discover new feeds and search articles
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Read the latest news from the websites that matter to you most, even when you’re offline. Simply sign in with a free Feedly account and subscribe to your favourite blogs, magazines, and news sources. Byline automatically stays in sync and brings you new content, putting thousands of RSS feeds at your fingertips. FEATURES: - Stay in sync across devices and the web via feedly.com. - Move between articles quickly with a simple swipe gesture. - Read offline with cached images and (optionally) full web pages. - Find new feeds and search for articles in the app or with Spotlight. - Sync and cache articles automatically with Background App Refresh.
RSS News Ticker
Organize your news feeds with this reader. Subscribe to RSS and Atom sources, with articles cached locally for offline reading. Features include iCloud sync, a unified newsfeed, tagging for organization, bookmarking, and word muting.
- Subscribe to RSS & Atom feeds
- Offline article caching
- iCloud sync across devices
- Unified newsfeed and timeline
- Tagging for article organization
- Bookmark articles for later
- Mute specific words or topics
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Start bringing order in your news-jungle. Ticker can help you with that. FEATURES Subscribe RSS & Atom sources Subscribe to RSS and Atom feeds in Ticker. All articles are cached locally so you can read them on the go. Use pull-to-refresh to sync all your sources at once. iCloud Sync Your data is only accessible to you, thats why Ticker uses your private iCloud to sync across your devices. Newsfeed & Timeline Access articles of all your sources in one newsfeed. Check your viewed articles in the dedicated timeline. Tags Use tags to bring order in the news-jungle. Tags identify relevant articles by keywords you can define. Articles which include a keyword are automatically assigned to that tag. You can look up relevant articles per tag or view all articles that have at least one tag assigned. Bookmarks Don't have time to read all articles when they pop up? No problem, you can bookmark articles and read them later on. A dedicated Bookmarks view keeps track of all your bookmarked articles to have it available anytime. Mute words Sometimes, topics pop up in your feed, that might not be interesting. In that case, you can mute words for a specific period of time (one day, a week, a month) or even forever.
Screenshots
Verdict
Byline 5 and RSS News Ticker both sit at 4.3 stars, but that hides the real split: 88% of RSS News Ticker's written reviews are positive against 41% of Byline 5's. RSS News Ticker also leads on update cadence (every 3 weeks vs every 5 months). Byline 5's advantage is ratings volume (73 vs 13) and iOS requirement (9.0 vs 17.6). On price, rating, ads and in-app purchases there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price · Rating · Positive reviews · Number of ratings · Update frequency · Ads · In-app purchases · Monetization · Best chart rank · Devices · Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Byline 5 sells 2 one-off in-app purchases and RSS News Ticker sells 3 one-off in-app purchases. Whichever you choose, the download price is not the number that matters.
Byline 5 holds the better App Store score, 4.3 against 4.2. That said, the two scores are not equally well evidenced: Byline 5 has 73 ratings behind it against 13, so its average is the more settled of the two. Written reviews complicate that: 41% of Byline 5's written reviews are positive against 88% of RSS News Ticker's, so the app with the better star average is not the one people write more warmly about.
Byline 5 ships an update every 5 months, RSS News Ticker every 3 weeks. The most recent releases landed on November 6, 2026 and November 3, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Byline 5 | RSS News Ticker |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Rating | 4.3 (73 ratings) — better | 4.2 (13 ratings) |
| Positive reviews | 40.9% of reviews | 87.5% of reviews — better |
| Number of ratings | 73 — better | 13 |
| Update frequency | Every 5 months | Every 3 weeks — better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | Yes | Yes |
| Monetization | Free with in-app purchases | Free with in-app purchases |
| Devices | iPhone, iPad, iPod — better | iPhone, iPad |
| Requires iOS | 9.0 — better | 17.6 |
| Further details — not scored | ||
| Size | 8 MB | 10 MB |
| Age rating | 17+ | 17+ |
| Developer | Phantom Fish | Daniel Hoefer |
Customer experience
Byline 5
RSS News Ticker
Bugs and requests
Byline 5
Reported bugs
20 issues- App freezes after opening articles
- App attempts to paste from clipboard on opening
- Paid version still shows ads
- Unable to sign in via Google account
- Google login error: 'This browser or app may not be secure'
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- Cannot login to Feedly
- App freezes when initiating sync
- Offline page caching broken
- Offline reading only works for text, no images/diagrams
- Cannot link into websites when offline
- Cached items number in settings seems static
- Syncing is too slow
- Swipe sensitivity decreased
- Swipe gestures are difficult to use
- Swipe to mark as read is slow
- Mark all as read function moved to categories
- Cannot open items to Chrome
- Offline saving of web pages not working
- App crashes when trying to sign in with Feedly
- Doubling of some headlines
Requested features
12 requests- Add progress indicator for downloads
- Add dark mode
- Add widgets
- Improve swipe sensitivity
- Allow reordering of feeds
Show 7 moreShow fewer
- Add 'mark all as read' when scrolling
- Improve offline caching for images/diagrams
- Add option to expand groups to see sites within them
- Add font size adjustment
- Make scrolling mark as read
- Move to top article after manual refresh
- Allow opening items in Chrome
RSS News Ticker
Not enough reviews yet to summarise bugs or requests.
In-app purchases
Byline 5
- Byline Premium$2.99
- Byline Premium$5.99
RSS News Ticker
- Small Tip$0.99
- Mid Tip$2.99
- Big Tip$5.99
