June 16, 2026
Retired, unbothered, and shipping
NetNewsWire Status
Retired dev spends a year fixing his beloved news app and fans are obsessed
TLDR: NetNewsWire’s retired creator spent the past year rebuilding the app’s foundations, fixing bugs, and making it smoother instead of chasing flashy new features. Users are overwhelmingly thrilled, calling it their everyday reading app, with the only real grumble being too many ads on some opened pages.
The biggest plot twist in NetNewsWire’s status update is almost too good: the developer retired, proudly declared he added “not one penny” to shareholder value, and then somehow got more done. In one year, he and contributors pushed 2,188 changes into the long-running RSS app — basically a tool that lets people read updates from sites in one calm feed instead of doomscrolling across a dozen noisy apps. The work was not flashy at first. It was the unsexy but important stuff: fixing crashes, making the app faster, cutting battery drain, cleaning up old code, and adding clearer error messages so users can actually see what’s going wrong.
And the comments? Pure wholesome fandom with a tiny side of digital angst. Several users called it their “daily driver,” which in app-speak is basically a marriage proposal. One person said it’s the app they spend the most time in — then immediately admitted their real enemy is FOMO, the fear of missing out, because once all your news is in one place, apparently your self-control enters the chat and leaves. Another praised NetNewsWire as the best RSS reader on iPhone, while a newer user delivered the funniest irony of the thread: they downloaded it to reduce their news addiction. The only real mini-drama came from ad overload inside built-in browser pages, but even that was framed like, “We know this probably isn’t your fault, but help?” In other words: rare internet moment — people are not rage-posting, they’re basically sending thank-you notes.
Key Points
- •NetNewsWire’s past year of development focused primarily on modernization, technical debt reduction, and bug fixes rather than new feature additions.
- •The project recorded 2,188 commits and adopted technologies including Swift structured concurrency, async/await, Liquid Glass UI, and parser migrations from Objective-C to Swift.
- •The article reports reductions in crashes, battery use, memory use, hang rate, scroll hitch rate, and disk writes, alongside broader performance improvements.
- •Developer tooling and infrastructure were upgraded through GitHub CI, SwiftLint, tests, Logger, localizability work, and deprecation handling such as a switch to NWPathMonitor.
- •The post says foundational work is nearing completion, credits contributors including Stuart Breckenridge, and notes a move from Slack to a Discourse forum for public support and discussion.