When Indie Apps Are Half-Baked: My Reeder Experience

I love the indie app ecosystem. Applications made by people, for people — no ads, no shady telemetry, no corporate nonsense. There’s something genuinely wholesome about it. But lately, I keep running into a pattern that’s starting to frustrate me: apps that feel half-baked. Or maybe I’m just “special”… 😄

Constructive criticism is something I genuinely believe in. Everyone loves praise, but honest feedback is what actually pushes creators — and products — to be better. So, in that spirit, let me talk about my recent experience with Reeder.

The 500 Feeds Problem

Here’s the thing: I imported around 500 RSS feeds. Not the most common use case, I’ll admit, but hardly an edge case that should break an app. What followed was a series of frustrations that I can only describe as baffling.

First, while you can import feeds in bulk, you can only delete them one by one. I’m sorry — what? You’re telling me I can pour 500 feeds in through the front door, but I have to carry them out one at a time through a tiny window? That’s a dealbreaker for anyone managing a large feed library.

Second, once you have that many feeds, syncing becomes completely unreliable — mostly it just doesn’t happen at all. And reinstalling the app doesn’t help either, because it cheerfully imports all your feeds right back on the next sync.

I ran into similar issues with Miniflux, though at least there you have an escape hatch — you can run a SQL script from the console or just delete the database and start fresh. Not exactly elegant, but at least the door isn’t locked.

32 Days of Silence

I reached out to Reeder’s author on Mastodon to describe the problem. Thirty-two days later — nothing. No reply, no acknowledgment. (My 2nd attempt over email was no difference)

So I made a decision: I removed Reeder from my phone and cancelled my subscription. An app that can’t handle bulk feed management and whose author doesn’t respond to user feedback isn’t something I can justify paying for — especially when it’s simply unusable in my situation.

The Door Is Still Open

This isn’t a permanent breakup. I genuinely want to like Reeder — the design is clean, the concept is solid, and I respect what indie developers are building. If bulk feed management ever gets proper attention, I’d happily resubscribe.

But until then, the search for a better RSS setup continues. If you have recommendations, you know where to find me. 🐾