Hi HN — I'm the author. Basic Reader is an RSS/Atom reader for iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and it's also how I taught myself iOS development. I'd written very little Swift before starting this; I built it by pairing with Claude, treating it less like a code generator and more like a very patient senior engineer I could ask "why" until I actually understood the answer. A few of the more interesting technical bits: - Zero third-party dependencies. Feed parsing, networking, and search are all built on Apple's own frameworks. - On-device semantic search using NLContextualEmbedding (a BERT-based model via the NaturalLanguage framework). It's a two-phase search: instant word-match results on every keystroke, then a 300ms-debounced semantic re-rank via cosine similarity over Accelerate. Nothing leaves the device. - The filter engine (wildcard/regex/semantic rules, scoped to a feed, folder, or globally) went through a few rearchitectures once I had enough articles to notice it doing full-table rescans on every toggle. It now maintains a persisted per-article rule-mask index instead of recomputing visibility from scratch. - Sync is SwiftData mirrored through CloudKit — no account system, just your existing Apple ID. - Mac isn't a stretched iPad UI — it's Mac Catalyst with a real three-column layout, full keyboard shortcuts, and right-click context menus. - No analytics SDKs, no backend servers at all, so there's genuinely nothing of yours for me to see. It's free to download and use for reading; a single one-time purchase (no subscription) unlocks search, filters, sync, and a couple of other things. Happy to go into more detail on any of this — the semantic filter matching in particular went through a lot of iteration and I'd be curious what this crowd thinks of the approach.

Basic Reader — RSS With No Subscription

A feature-full, subscription-free RSS reader for iOS & Mac

A feature-full, subscription-free RSS reader for iOS & Mac