According to Brent Simmons writing on Inessential, the open-source RSS reader NetNewsWire has completed a major year-long modernization. Having retired in June 2025, Simmons focused the past year on clearing technical debt rather than adding features—2,188 commits dedicated to upgrading from Objective-C to Swift's modern async/await concurrency, adopting the new Liquid Glass UI framework, and rebuilding XML and HTML parsers from scratch. The payoff is tangible: less battery drain, lower memory footprint, fewer crashes, smoother scrolling. The team also overhauled diagnostics and error reporting, letting power users see what's happening under the hood—iCloud sync status, feed activity, detected problems—which reduces support burden and frees time for new features. Foundation work is nearly complete, and the RSS reader landscape just got a little more solid.

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