Good RSS services have a weirdly challenging job: they have to gather content from loads of different places and display it for you, all while getting out of the way as much as possible. It means I don't have to constantly check and see if Derek Sivers or Tynan has published a new post-it just pops up in my feeds. I follow a few dozen tech sites, but it's also really great for following blogs that only publish a few times a year. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.Īs a tech writer, I rely on my RSS app to keep me up to date on what's going on. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. Unless explicitly stated, we spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. Our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software. My picks for the best RSS readers are far nicer than Reader ever was. The world of RSS apps has moved on and, a decade later, is actually in a much better place than it likely would have been if Google had remained at the top. While it's still traditional to bemoan the death of Google Reader all the way back in 2013 in any article about RSS, I'll skip the eulogy.

You just open your RSS app and get reading, with every article and blog post presented in reverse chronological order. Still, it remains the absolute best way to combine stuff from loads of different places into one central app, where you can read it without having to click around a bunch of sites or scroll through your social feeds. Although pretty much every podcast app relies on RSS, it isn't as publicly popular as it used to be. RSS (it stands for Really Simple Syndication) has been around since the '90s, and it's a way for sites to publish a feed of all their content in a way that can be easily parsed and aggregated by RSS apps.

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