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NewsBlur has asked for a username and password since the beginning. That still works, but I wanted getting into your reader to be easier, especially on a new phone. I’ve added Sign in with Apple and Sign in with Google on the web, iOS, and Android. You can use either to create an account or connect to the NewsBlur account you already have.
Apple and Google sign-in on the web
The welcome page, login page, and signup page now have Apple and Google buttons above the usual username and password fields. Choose either provider to sign in or create a NewsBlur account. For a new account, you’ll choose a NewsBlur username so you still have your own name when sharing stories and commenting.
If you already have a NewsBlur account, you can connect it instead of starting over. Choose Connect an existing account and enter your NewsBlur username and password. If you try to create an account with a username that’s already taken, NewsBlur brings you to that connection step and explains what to do.
You only need to confirm your NewsBlur password when making that connection. Afterward, the Apple or Google button takes you back to the same feeds, saved stories, and subscription.
Different email addresses, one NewsBlur account
Your Apple email doesn’t have to match your Google email, and neither has to match your NewsBlur email. You can connect a personal Apple account and a work Google account to the same NewsBlur username. Connecting them leaves your NewsBlur email address unchanged.
Open Manage > Account on the web and look under your email address. The new Connected accounts section lists each connected Apple or Google account and its email. Use Connect Apple or Connect Google to add another, or the little × beside a connection to remove it.
An Apple or Google account can belong to one NewsBlur account at a time. To move it, disconnect it from the old account first. NewsBlur also makes sure you keep a way to sign in before removing your last connection.
Sign in on iOS
The iPhone and iPad apps get the same Apple and Google sign-in choices. You can also create an account with an email, username, and password right on the welcome screen.
Sign in on Android
Android gets both provider buttons as well, including Sign in with Apple. The account connection works across platforms: connect a provider on the web and use it to sign into that same NewsBlur account on your phone.
For new readers, both mobile apps also have a new first-time experience that helps you choose your first feeds and get reading.
Apple and Google sign-in are available now on the web and coming in the next iOS and Android updates. If you have feedback, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.
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An empty reader is a hard place to start. If you already know which sites you want to follow, adding them is straightforward. But if you’re trying RSS for the first time, finding those first few feeds is part of the work. I wanted NewsBlur to help with that, right inside the app.
I’ve rebuilt the first-time experience on iOS and Android around exploring interests, previewing feeds, and choosing what goes into your reader. You can put together a few folders of things you care about, or bring your existing collection from another app with an OPML import.
Explore your interests on iOS
After creating your account, the iPhone and iPad apps open a setup screen with Explore interests. Browse categories such as science, books, cooking, and technology, or search for a topic. A little of everything gives you a starting point if you’d rather sample a mix.
Each category opens a bundle of feeds. You can see what the sites actually publish through recent story previews, rather than choosing from names alone. Deselect feeds you don’t want, give the folder a name, and add the ones you like.
You can keep exploring and add another bundle before heading into the reader. The idea is to make those first subscriptions your own, with enough context to decide whether a feed belongs in your daily reading.
Build your first folders on Android
Android gets the same interest-based setup. Browse or search the catalog, open a bundle, and look through its feeds before subscribing. The import option is right at the top if you’re coming from another reader.
Feed cards show recent stories, how often a site publishes, and when it last updated. Choose the feeds you want and name the folder they’ll go into. A science folder, a cooking folder, and a handful of personal blogs can give you plenty to read without having to assemble every subscription one at a time.
The final setup step shows what you’ve added. Tap Start reading to head into your reader with your folders ready.
Bring your feeds, or come back for more
On both platforms, Import OPML brings your feeds and folders from another reader. Export an OPML file from your old app, save it somewhere your phone can access, and select it during setup.
You don’t need a new account to use the bundles. Existing readers can open Import or upload sites from the iOS menu or Import and feed bundles from the Android menu. It’s a way to explore a new interest whenever you want to add something to your reading.
The new setup experience is coming in the next iOS and Android updates, alongside Sign in with Apple and Google. I’d love to hear how the first few minutes feel, whether you’re starting fresh or helping someone else get into RSS. Let me know on the NewsBlur forum.
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I spent a lot of this release optimizing speed in the iOS app. Opening a big folder took over a second, scrolling would hitch whenever the next page of stories loaded, and articles flashed blank for a moment before appearing. So I measured every part of the story list and the reader, then fixed whatever the numbers pointed at.
Faster story lists
Loading the next page of a folder used to reload the entire list. Now new stories are added in place. Favicons, thumbnails, and story text get prepared in the background ahead of time instead of while you’re scrolling. Opening a feed shows its cached stories immediately while fresh ones load, and articles appear fully laid out instead of flashing blank first.
Opening All Site Stories went from 1.1s to 0.2s. A single feed went from 0.7s to 0.2s. Loading another page into a list of 5,000 stories went from 0.7s to 0.02s.
A glass toolbar
The story list toolbar is now a floating glass bar at the bottom of the screen on iPhone and iPad, and your stories scroll right behind it. Related Sites, story order, and search are on the left. Add and Mark as read are on the right. If you’d rather keep it at the top, you can move it back in Preferences. In the reader, the controls hide as you scroll down and come back when you scroll up.
Images
Tap an image in a story and it opens full screen, zooming out from its spot in the article. Pinch or double tap to zoom, drag to look around, and swipe to go back. On iPad the viewer covers all three columns, and you land right back where you were in the story.
Long press an image to see its hover text above it, which is where comics like xkcd hide the punchline. Copy Image, Save Image, and Share Image are right there with it.
Add + Discover Sites
The + button opens a Quick Add sheet. Paste an address or search for a site, pick a folder, and add it. Below that are shortcuts into every discovery source: Search, Web Feed, Popular, YouTube, Reddit, Newsletters, Podcasts, and Google News. You can swipe between them like pages. It’s the same Add + Discover Sites catalog from the web, rebuilt natively for iOS.
Each site shows its latest stories with an image and a short excerpt, along with how recently it published. Tap a story to read it, or tap Try to browse the site without subscribing. When you come back, you’re in the same spot with that story highlighted. On iPad, Try keeps all three columns, so you can browse a new site and read its stories side by side. Related Sites uses the same cards.
Offline storage that cleans up after itself
A reader on the forum noticed NewsBlur using 4.2 GB on their iPhone with no unread stories. Digging in turned up three bugs in the offline cache. Cleanup skipped pruning whenever you were all caught up, it never cleared cached article text, and it compacted the database before deleting anything, so no space ever came back.
All three are fixed. Cleanup now keeps storage within your Stories to store limit, and Delete offline stories in Preferences actually gives you the space back. Your subscriptions and any pending read or save changes are kept.
Everything else
- Long press any feed, folder, or story for a native menu.
- Mark newer as read and Mark older as read update your unread counts right away, even inside collapsed folders and while offline.
- Feed and story gestures each have their own settings.
- The Mac app gets the new discovery screen, image viewer, menus, and offline cleanup too.
- Tapping a notification opens the story instead of sometimes getting stuck.
- Reading positions are restored correctly.
NewsBlur 15 is available on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac. The Android release got a lot of the same work. If you have feedback, I’d love to hear it on the NewsBlur forum.
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I spent a lot of this release optimizing speed in the Android app. I measured scrolling across the feed list, the story list, and long articles, then fixed whatever the numbers pointed at. Then I kept going.
It’s faster
Most of the slowness came from the app doing more work than it needed to. Marking a story read rebuilt its entire row. Background syncs could pile up on top of each other. The feed list waited on the sync service before showing anything, and the reader waited for the article to finish rendering before it appeared at all.
All of that is fixed. Janky frames while scrolling the feed list dropped from 32% to 15%, and from 14% to 7% in the story list. Opening a story you’ve read before went from 0.9s to 0.2s. Your feeds now load straight from the local cache, so they show up right away, even offline.
Controls that float
The story list controls now float at the bottom of the screen, so your stories scroll right behind them. Search, display options, and settings are all within reach of your thumb. If you’d rather have them at the top, there’s a setting for that in Preferences. In the reader, the controls tuck away as you scroll down and come back as soon as you scroll up.
Built for tablets
On a tablet or an unfolded foldable, NewsBlur now shows your story list and the story you’re reading side by side. Your feeds slide in over the top when you need them and slide back out when you pick one, and the list stays right where it is while the new stories fill in. Tap another story and the reader pages over to it, the same way it does when you swipe. It works in both portrait and landscape.
A better look at images
Tap any image in a story to open it full screen. Pinch or double tap to zoom, and swipe it away to go right back to the story.
Long press an image and you get the same viewer with a little more. The image’s hover text shows up above it, which is where comics like xkcd keep the punchline. Below it are Copy Image, Save Image, and Share Image. Saving keeps the original file, so a GIF stays animated, and it lands in your Pictures folder. If the image is a link, there’s an Open Link button too.
Find your next favorite site
The + button opens a small Add Site sheet. Paste an address and pick a folder, or tap one of the shortcuts into discovery: Web Feed, Popular, Trending, YouTube, Reddit, Newsletters, Podcasts, and Google News. It’s the same Add + Discover Sites catalog from the web, built right into the app. Web Feed can even turn a site without RSS into a feed.
Every site shows its latest stories with images and excerpts, along with how recently it published. Tap a story to read it, or tap Try to browse the whole site before you subscribe. When you come back, discovery is right where you left it. Related Sites uses the same cards, so you can explore outward from a site you already like.
Everything else
- Gestures are configurable. In Preferences you can choose what swiping left and right does on feeds and on stories, and what a long press does.
- Long press a feed or a story for a grouped menu that includes Mark newer as read and Mark older as read.
- Nested folders show up as an indented tree.
- The Previous button no longer gets stuck disabled.
- Jumping to the next folder no longer loops forever when nothing is unread.
NewsBlur 15 for Android is available on Google Play. The iOS and Mac release got a lot of the same work. If something doesn’t feel right, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.
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The Intelligence Trainer has always asked you to decide blind. You see a tag or an author on a story and you can train it up or down, but you can’t see what else that decision would touch. Is this author a regular on this site or a one-time guest? Does the “review” tag mean product reviews or book reviews? How many stories does “sponsored” actually hit? Until now the only way to find out was to train it and watch the scores change across the feed.
Now every tag, author, and URL on a story has a small button next to it: View matching stories. Click it and the story list turns into a view of every story on that site that carries that exact value. Not just unread stories, read ones too, so you get the whole picture. It’s the fastest way I’ve found to answer “what else is like this?”
From a story
Open any story and look at the author and tags under the title. Each one now has a small stories icon beside it. Click it and the list filters down to every story that matches that one author or tag. The URL line gets the same button, so you can pull up every story that shares a path segment, which turns out to be a great way to find a series or a podcast on a site that doesn’t tag its posts.
The matching text is highlighted on every row of the filtered list. An author filter marks the author on each story, a title filter marks the words it matched, and a text filter marks the phrase in the preview.
A URL filter is a little different, since the link isn’t normally part of the story list. When one is active, each row grows a URL line with the matched segment highlighted, so you can see exactly why the story is there.
The filter rides along in the URL, so reload, back and forward, and bookmarks all do what you’d expect. I have a few of these bookmarked now for authors I check in on every couple of weeks.
From the trainer
The same button lives in the Intelligence Trainer on every tag, author, title, URL, and text classifier you’ve saved. This is the part I’ve wanted for years. You trained “sponsored” as hidden a long time ago and have a nagging feeling it’s swallowing something it shouldn’t. Click the magnifying glass on that classifier, the trainer closes, and you’re looking at exactly the stories it hides. A Back to trainer link in the banner takes you back to where you were.
Regex classifiers and natural language classifiers don’t get the button, since neither one matches a single exact value.
The banner
At the top of every filtered list is a banner that names the filter and gives you three things to do with it.
Filter stories widens the list from this site to the whole folder or to all of your sites. Site scope is available to everyone. Folder and All follow the same rule as folder and global classifiers, so they need Premium Archive. On Archive, a folder or all-sites tag filter runs against the story search index rather than a window of recent stories, so a tag that appears on a dozen stories spread across forty sites turns up all twelve.
Train is Like, Dislike, or Hide (the super dislike). It saves the same classifier the trainer would, and the list recomputes in place: the score flips on each row, the unread counts in the sidebar update, and stories you just trained down stay in the list so you can see what you did instead of watching rows vanish out from under you.
Notify on is Email, Web, iOS, and Android. These are the per-classifier notifications from earlier this year, now reachable from the same banner. You find a tag, confirm it matches what you think it matches, and turn on a notification for it without ever opening the trainer.
One detail worth knowing: the Filter stories toggle only changes what you’re looking at. Training and notifications still write to the classifier’s own scope. Browsing a tag across a folder doesn’t quietly turn a site classifier into a folder classifier.
A few ways I’ve been using it
- Deciding whether to follow an author. A group blog has a new writer. Click the button beside their name, read three of their stories, then Like them from the banner.
- Auditing a hidden tag. Open the trainer, click the magnifying glass on a red tag, and check that it’s hiding what you meant it to hide.
- Pulling up a series. Click the button on the URL line of a story with
/podcast/in the link and every episode on the site lines up. - Setting up a notification with confidence. Widen a tag to a folder, see that it matches the right kind of story, and turn on the iOS notification right there.
Availability
Matching Stories is available now on the web for everyone. Site scope, training, and highlighting work on every account. Folder and All scopes and the Notify on controls follow the existing rules for Premium Archive and Premium Pro.
If you find a tag or author that should match and doesn’t, or have an idea for where else this button belongs, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.
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I’m announcing two new global feeds: a redesigned Global Shared Stories and a new feed called Good Reads.
Redesigned Global Shared Stories
Global Shared Stories has been in the sidebar for years, and for years it worked in a way I never liked. It was not the shares of everybody on NewsBlur. It was the shares of the accounts that the @popular account happened to follow, a list I put together by hand a long time ago and rarely touched. If you were on that list and you shared a lot, you decided what everybody else saw. If you shared one story a month and wrote a paragraph about why it mattered, you were drowned out by someone who shared thirty without a word.
So I rebuilt it. Every hour, NewsBlur now gathers every story shared across the whole site in the last few hours, caps each person at three so nobody can flood the pool, drops private blurblogs, and then picks a few worth reading. The picks accumulate, so the river stays deep enough to scroll back through.
The picking is done by Claude Haiku, once an hour, and it is worth being precise about what it does and does not do. It does not go looking for stories. It does not write anything. It only ranks stories that NewsBlur readers already chose to share, and the thing it weighs most heavily is the comment the sharer wrote, because a share with a few sentences attached is a share somebody thought about. It is allowed to pick nothing at all in a quiet hour, and in testing it regularly passes on half of what it is offered. If the API is ever unreachable, a plain heuristic takes over and the river keeps flowing.
Good Reads
The new feed in the sidebar is Good Reads, and it asks a question the other feeds do not: which stories did somebody finish and then do something about?
A story lands in Good Reads when at least two people read it closely, thirty seconds or more, and at least one of them then saved it, shared it, or trained it up. Finishing is not enough. Somebody has to have bothered to act. On top of that, the score is tilted toward feeds with few subscribers, so a story from a site with forty readers can beat a story from a site with forty thousand. That tilt is the whole point. The big sites do not need help getting seen.
Four feeds, four questions
There are now four curated rivers sitting together in the sidebar, and the reason there are four and not one is that they each answer a different question.
Global Shared Stories asks what people chose to hand to someone else. It runs on sharing, a deliberate human act.
Widely Read Stories asks what held the most attention across NewsBlur. It runs on reading time, not clicks, so a headline nobody read cannot buy its way in.
Long Reads asks what was worth an afternoon. Features and essays that readers gave real time to, rather than skimmed.
Good Reads asks what somebody finished and then kept, and leans toward the small sites you have probably never heard of.Widely Read Stories and Long Reads have been around since April, and I wrote about how they work when they launched. None of the four ranks by clicks, and none of them is trying to keep you scrolling. They are all built out of what NewsBlur readers actually did with their time.
Because it was never obvious from looking at them which was which, each of the four now explains itself in a line at the top of its story list. It scrolls away with the stories, so it is there when you arrive and gone once you are reading.
Your classifiers still apply to all four. If you have trained a tag, an author, or a site, those green and red scores carry through, including on stories from feeds you do not subscribe to. And all four work as dashboard rivers, so you can park any of them next to your regular feeds.
Good Reads and the rebuilt Global Shared Stories are available now on the web. If a story shows up in one of these feeds that clearly should not have, I want to hear about it on the NewsBlur forum.
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Someone on the forum posted a long-ish list of ideas, and one of them was small enough that I built it the same week: let people change the NewsBlur app icon. Your home screen is yours, and an app you open dozens of times a day should look the way you want it to. So premium subscribers can now choose a custom app icon on iOS, Mac, and Android.
There are 12 color flavors: Sunrise Gold, Ember Orange, Coral Rose, Ruby Red, Plum Berry, Lavender Iris, Atlantic Blue, Arctic Cyan, Teal Mint, Meadow Sage, Slate Gray, and Sepia Cocoa. Every flavor comes in a light and a dark variant, so there are 24 icons to pick from. Match a bright home screen, match a dark one, or just pick the color you like best.
To change yours, open Preferences and find the App Icon section, then tap Choose Icon. The chooser shows a live preview of every flavor, and the new icon takes effect right away.
Custom app icons are available now on the latest iOS, Mac, and Android apps for any premium subscriber. If you have an idea for a flavor that’s missing, or anything else, let me know on the NewsBlur forum.
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Some of you don’t just read the news. You monitor it. You’re tracking competitors, watching for security disclosures, following regulatory changes, or covering a beat where being 30 minutes late means you missed the story. NewsBlur has always been a great reader, but for people who need it to be a monitoring tool, I wanted to build something that takes feed fetching and filtering seriously.
Premium Pro is the new top tier. It includes everything in Premium Archive and adds two things that matter when speed is the priority: high-frequency fetching and a 10,000 site limit. And when you pair that with Premium Archive features like classifier-driven notifications, Pro becomes a real-time monitoring system.
Every feed fetched every 5 minutes
This is the headline feature. When you’re on Pro, every single feed in your account is checked every 5 minutes. This isn’t based on how often the feed publishes or how popular it is. It’s every feed, every time, regardless.
For context, most RSS readers check feeds every hour or two. Even NewsBlur’s Premium tier updates feeds up to 5x more often than standard, but Pro goes further. If a CVE drops, a competitor publishes a press release, or a regulatory filing appears, you’ll see it in minutes, not hours.
Notifications that actually keep up
Fast fetching only matters if you find out about new stories quickly. NewsBlur has a full notification system that pairs perfectly with Pro’s 5-minute polling. You can enable notifications per feed and choose whether to be notified about all unread stories or only Focus stories that match your intelligence training.
Notifications go to every platform at once: iOS push notifications, Android push notifications, browser notifications on the web, Mac notifications, and email. Set up a few critical feeds with notifications enabled and you have a real-time alerting pipeline built on RSS.
Classifier-driven notifications, supercharged by Pro
Premium Archive recently added the ability to attach notifications directly to individual classifiers. Train a tag, author, title keyword, or phrase, and turn on notifications for that specific classifier. Track a specific author across a folder of feeds. Watch for a tag like “layoffs” or “acquisition” across your entire account. Get pinged the moment a story about a competitor shows up anywhere in your subscriptions. Classifier notifications work at every scope: per-feed, per-folder, or global across all your feeds.
These classifiers now come in three flavors. Standard classifiers match exact tags, authors, and keywords. Regex classifiers let you write patterns like
\bCVE-\d{4}-\d+\bto catch any CVE identifier, oriPhone|iPad|MacBookto track multiple products in a single classifier. And natural language classifiers let you describe what you’re looking for in plain English, like “stories about startup funding rounds over $50M” or “any mention of regulatory action against tech companies.” All three types can have notifications attached.
On their own, classifier notifications are already useful. But on Pro, where every feed is checked every 5 minutes, they become something else entirely. Create a natural language classifier for exactly the kind of story you’re watching for, attach a notification, and within minutes of that story appearing in any of your feeds, you have a push notification on your phone. That’s the difference between knowing about something the same day and knowing about it the same hour. If you’re already using classifier notifications on Premium Archive, Pro is what makes them fast enough for real monitoring.
Follow up to 10,000 sites
Pro raises the feed limit to 10,000. Premium supports 1,024 sites, Premium Archive supports 4,096, and Pro takes it to 10,000. If you need comprehensive coverage across industries, beats, competitors, or research domains, this is the ceiling you’ve been looking for.
Everything in Archive, included
Pro includes the full Premium Archive feature set. That means every story archived and searchable forever, Ask AI for answering questions about stories, full-text content training, global and folder-scoped intelligence training, per-feed auto-mark-read timers, and more. Pro adds speed and precision on top of that foundation.
You also get priority support, so when you need help, you’re at the front of the line.
Pricing
Premium Pro is $29/month. It’s monthly rather than yearly because the high-frequency fetching infrastructure costs more to operate. You’re paying for dedicated polling of up to 10,000 feeds every 5 minutes. If your work depends on being the first to know, Pro pays for itself.
You can upgrade from the Premium page on the web. If you have feedback or ideas for Pro, I’d love to hear them on the NewsBlur forum.
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There are two questions I keep coming back to when I open my reader: what are other people reading right now, and what’s worth setting aside time for? Not what’s trending on social media or what an algorithm thinks will get clicks. What are actual readers spending their time on?
Two new feeds in the sidebar answer those questions: Widely Read Stories and Long Reads. Both are ranked by actual reading time rather than clicks or social shares.
Widely Read Stories
This feed collects stories that three or more NewsBlur readers have spent meaningful time with over the past week. “Meaningful time” means at least 3 seconds of actual reading, so quick scrolls and accidental opens don’t count. The list is refreshed every hour and stories are sorted by publish date, so you see the latest widely read articles first.
Think of it as a window into what the NewsBlur community is reading right now. It’s not an algorithm trying to maximize engagement. It’s just the stories that real people are spending their time on.
Long Reads
The Long Reads feed takes a different angle. Instead of counting readers, it ranks stories by average time spent per reader. A story that five people each read for four minutes ranks higher than a story that fifty people glanced at for thirty seconds. This naturally surfaces longer, deeper articles that reward sustained attention.
Your classifiers apply here too
These aren’t just raw lists of stories. When you open Widely Read Stories or Long Reads, your trained classifiers run against every story. Tags, authors, titles, and text classifiers all apply, so stories from feeds you’ve trained show up with the same green and red intelligence scoring you see everywhere else in NewsBlur. If you’ve trained a tag as interesting or an author as disliked, those scores carry through into the trending feeds.
Dashboard support
Both feeds are available as dashboard river options. Open your dashboard settings, pick “Widely Read Stories” or “Long Reads” from the river dropdown, and the feed appears as a panel alongside your other dashboard rivers.
Availability
Widely Read Stories and Long Reads are available now on the web. Look for them in the sidebar below Global Shared Stories. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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When you share a story on NewsBlur, sometimes the whole article isn’t the point. You want to call out a specific paragraph, a key finding, a sentence that made you think. Until now, you’d have to manually copy-paste text into the comment box and add your own formatting. Now you can select any text in a story, click Quote, and it drops into the share dialog as a styled blockquote, ready for you to add your own commentary underneath.
How it works
Select text in any story and a popover appears with the usual options: Highlight, Train, and Search. There’s now a new option: Quote. Click it, and the share dialog opens with your selected text rendered as a blockquote above the comment field.
Add your own comment below the quote, or just share the quote by itself. The share button updates to say “Share with comment” when there’s a quote or comment present. If you change your mind, click the × on the blockquote to remove it.
Once shared, the blockquote renders with a left border and italic styling in the comment thread, so other readers can see exactly what caught your eye before reading your take on it.
The quote feature works anywhere text selection is available: the story detail view, highlighted text, and search results. It’s available now on the web. If you have feedback or ideas, please share them on the NewsBlur forum.
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