Elytra Blog

September 2025 Release

Elytra v2025.9.0 delivers a fresh Liquid Glass look, performance improvements, and deeper customization for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.

A Decade of Elytra

In July of 2015, Google Reader had been shut down for two years now. The need for a good reader app and service wasn’t filled by most alternatives available then. I’d been thinking of building one myself, but it felt like a massive undertaking. And I was very specific with what I wanted from such an app:

• Private: No collection of personally identifiable information. Not even my name or email ID.
• Custom Font Support: This was critical for me so I could configure the app and make it easier for me read long-form articles.
• Fast: Should be backed by an API service which fetches articles for me, instead of my devices checking individual feeds.

September 2024.9 Release

The September 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

April 2024.4.1 Release

The April 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

April 2024 Release

The April 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

February 2024 Release

The February 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

January 2024 Release

The January 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

November 2023 Release

The November release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.

v2023.10 for iOS

v2023.10 brings major improvements to the app, multiple bug fixes, and more coming soon...

This build also lands full support for iOS & iPadOS 17.

Improvements & Fixes

• New fluid toolbar design enabling you to fully take advantage of the full screen displays on modern devices.
• Fixed multiple bugs with widgets, most importantly:
  • tapping on an article in the widget now opens the correct article instead of the first article
  • widgets now show the articles in correct order
• New & faster sync API
• Simpler UI for adding feeds and folders
• Recommendations have been removed from the app, when adding a new feed, Elytra will now always prefer the direct feed URL instead.

You can download the update from the App Store.

The macOS app is being re-written using AppKit, it previously used MacCatalyst which has become harder to support over the last two years.

The Mac app is in a much better state now, but lacks some critical functionality like OPML imports, text customisation and the like. Rest assured, it's on track to be released by December 2023, or latest by January 2024.

January 2023 Release

I wish you a healthy & safe 2023. Elytra’s Jan 2023 release is full of fixes and stability improvements.

You can download the latest Mac release from Github as well. 

If you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.

Improved

• App now uses the article’s date for notification timestamps

• Improves app responsiveness and reduces disk I/O usage.

• Improved networking stack

• Changed Preferences menu title to Settings on macOS 13.x

• Marking articles read/unread is now a local operation, i.e. if the Cloud request fails for any reason, the information is persisted and will be synced with the Cloud API once your device or the service is reachable across the interwebs.

Fixes

• Assortment of fixes from various crash reports

• Fixed rendering and scrolling slowness on macOS 13.x

• Ongoing fixes for filtering articles

• Fixed feed title not being fully visible upon scrolling

• Fixed custom feed title not being used (macOS only)

• Fixed stuttering when image loads and scrolling in the article reader.