Unread RSS Reader

Unread 5.0 adds the following and more:

• Improvements around hero images, article list thumbnails, and thumbnails in widgets

• Syncing with FreshRSS and Miniflux

• The ability to quickly mark old articles read

Image Improvements:

• In prior versions, when Unread needed to resize an image to generate an article list thumbnail, it would focus on the center and crop as little as possible. Unread now looks for faces, animals, text, and other salient portions of the image. Unread then crops the image in a way that preserves them. For example, when Unread needs to generate a thumbnail of a tall and narrow image where a person’s face is near the top, Unread will generate a thumbnail with only the top of the image instead of the vertical center.

• Sometimes there is no way to crop an image to the desired aspect ratio without losing very significant parts of that image. When this is the case, Unread detects that and instead embeds it into the center of a larger image with the correct aspect ratio.

• When showing an article list thumbnail in a small amount of space and when there appears to be a small area of focus inside that image, the article list thumbnail will zoom in on that area of focus. This applies in compact article lists on iPhone, and in widgets.

• In Feedbin accounts, when Feedbin recommends an article list thumbnail for an article and Unread accepts that recommendation, Unread will now also prepend that image to the article content.

• Some feed syncing systems indicate when there are images associated with articles beyond those embedded in article content. The image URLs can come from the feed or from the underlying webpage. Under some circumstances, Unread prepends those images to the article content. With this update, Unread now ignores such an image when it appears to apply to the entire website.

Syncing With FreshRSS and Miniflux:

This update adds the ability to sync with FreshRSS accounts and with Miniflux accounts. Both FreshRSS and Miniflux are open source self-hosted web-based RSS readers.

Unread syncs with FreshRSS using its implementation of the Google Reader API, and with Miniflux using its REST API. It was already possible to sync with both FreshRSS and Miniflux using their implementations of the Fever API, but using a FreshRSS account or a Miniflux account adds:

• The ability to subscribe to feeds from within Unread and from the Subscribe in Unread share sheet extension.

• The ability to mark read on scroll.

Unread requires version 2.3.2 or later of Miniflux.

Migration From a Fever Account:

For customers who had been syncing with FreshRSS or Miniflux via their Fever API implementations, Unread makes it easy to add a FreshRSS or Miniflux account to Unread based on the existing Fever account. For FreshRSS this just requires one tap. For Miniflux you will need to enter an API key, but that is all.

You can add a FreshRSS account or Miniflux account from an applicable Fever account by long pressing it on Unread’s home screen, and choosing Add as FreshRSS/Miniflux Account from the resulting menu.

Mark Old Articles Read:

This update adds the ability to mark old articles read. Choose a threshold of 24 hours, 3 days, 7 days, 14 days, or 30 days. When invoked, all articles within the appropriate context that are older than that amount of time will be immediately marked read so that you can focus on newer articles.

You can invoke this from the swipe left menu of any article list or from the top level subscription list of an account.

This capability is not available for Fever accounts.

Additional Improvements:

• On iOS/iPadOS 27, this update adds extra large portrait Recent Articles widgets.

• When an iPhone is in landscape mode, the article list will now show a large image thumbnail on the right (like it does on the iPad), regardless of whether the Article List Format setting is set to Compact or Expansive.

Unread 5.0 requires iOS/iPadOS 18 or later.