If you’ve spent any time at all curating RSS feeds on your phone, you know how quickly “convenient” turns into “clunky” — half-baked web views, broken formatting, crowded toolbars. That’s why discovering lire was like finding the best kind of needle in a haystack: the kind that just makes things work.
Pulls Full Articles — Always Readable
Easily the most remarkable thing about lire is how it fetches the entire article for almost any feed. No more “Read more” links, partial snippets, or bouncing between app and browser just to read what you came for. lire grabs the whole webpage content, cleans it up, and presents it beautifully, so you never have to leave the app — a feature that changes the way you consume feeds, especially if you value speed, privacy, and simplicity.
Built for Syncing — Your Feeds, Everywhere
As someone who’s always on the lookout for seamless sync, lire fits right in with my self-hosted approach. The app doesn’t just offer “the basics” — it syncs with popular RSS services and self-hosted aggregators: FreshRSS, Miniflux, Nextcloud News, Tiny Tiny RSS, plus Feedly, Feedbin, BazQux, and more. In my case, I'm syncing it with a FreshRSS server. Whether your setup is local or cloud-based, lire adapts easily.
It also supports OPML import/export — so you always own your data and can move between services as needed, which is absolutely essential for long-term power users.
Customization Without Compromise
App settings are deep and finely tuned: you can tweak everything from appearance and sorting, to caching and share sheet actions. Want to change text size, adjust information density, or decide how and when things get marked as read? It’s all there. The amount of control lire gives you over your reading experience is on another level.
Performance, Privacy, and Offline Magic
lire’s caching system means you have full-text articles and images offline — perfect for those rural, spotty-cell days or when you travel off-grid. No subscriptions, no data collection, no ads, and no nonsense. It just works, fast and reliably, every single time.
My Final Thoughts and Rating
lire isn’t just “good for RSS”: it’s an app that understands why we use RSS in the first place. It’s rock-solid, deeply customizable, never invasive, and absolutely worth every penny. For anyone tired of RSS readers being glorified browser tabs — this is the answer. This app deserves every bit of 5 stars!
P.S.: For this review, I was using version 6.3.2 of the lire iOS app.
