My most anticipated app update for the iPhone 6 Plus arrived this week. I wrote about why Unread is my favorite RSS app for the iPad on The Sweet Setup, and I made a video showing why I love the interface. The truth is that Unread is possibly my favorite app on iOS, period. It’s been painful to have to use that beautiful interface, with its lovely Whitney font, in scaled up form. Getting this update makes my iPhone 6 Plus experience almost complete (looking in your direction, Omnifocus).
The app is now free to try for 50 articles, with an in-app purchase to unlock unlimited reading. If you're already an Unread user, the upgrade to unlimited is free (though I kicked in a tip for the hard work).
Downloading the update, however, is slightly complicated. Supertop has purchased the app from Jared Sinclair, and Supertop had to jump through a number of hoops to make the app their own. They’ve written a blog post about their experience and also talked about it on a recent episode of Inquisitive. The main thing to understand is that you have to download the new version of the app separately, and then the old and the new app communicate with each other to unlock the full features.
But the important thing is that we now have Unread, the single best iOS app for the 6 and 6 plus (thanks to sloppy swiping) “finally” optimized for those devices. The addition of the share sheet with iOS extensions is gravy on an already amazing app. My only real complaint about the old Unread was that I couldn’t tag links I sent to Pinboard. Now I can.
It was so depressing this past summer to read about Jared Sinclair’s disappointing experience making money from one of the most beautifully designed apps on iOS. Maybe RSS isn’t popular enough to sustain revenue. Maybe the pay upfront model really is dead. All I can say is that I’m enormously happy Supertop decided to keep the app running. Let’s hope this second life is a long one.
Go download it. Seriously.