Reeder is out today and Devon Dundee has a great overview over on MacStories. I wanted to call out a few things because as a Reeder 5 (now Reeder Classic) fanatic, I have thoughts.

With a product as successful and engrained as Reeder, it would be easy for the app’s developer Silvio Rizzi to stick to what works and keep it the same without rocking the boat.

Honestly, I get it. Reeder 5 is subtly better than Reeder 4 which was subtly better than Reeder 3. Reeder is one of those apps that has been around forever, and it’s been ridiculously great basically the whole time it’s been on the scene. I look at Reeder 5…ahem, Classic, and I honestly don’t want for much in the app. The developer likely has had similar thoughts: how do you make an RSS reader better when it’s already perfect for a lot of people?

From that perspective, branching out and trying something related, but new is very compelling.

It’s a massive break from the past that will likely prove divisive among Reeder’s longtime user base. At the same time, it has the potential to appeal to a whole new audience of users who’ve never tried RSS readers before.

This is something I need to remind myself sometimes: I’m not typical when it comes to consuming the web. I am reminded of this every time I see another trending blog post about how someone found RSS and thinks it’s ready for a (don’t call it a) comeback. I’ve been using RSS to follow my favorite websites for well over a decade, but most people haven’t. I’m a power user who follows close to 200 feeds and require crazy performance and the best keyboard shortcuts in the game to get through my feeds effectively, but most people don’t.

Given how popular Reeder is and how long it’s been around, it’s possible that Rizzi has sold as many copies of Reeder as he possibly could to the people out there who want an app like Reeder. If he made Reeder 6 and it was another iteration of the same thing, I wonder what percentage of customers would be coming from an older version of Reeder…60%? 80%? 95%??? Rizzi needs to make a living, and maybe this is a market he’s realistically capped out and he wants to expand to people who need to be reintroduced to the idea of non-algorithmic feeds.

There’s a lot to cover in this update, but first, a word of reassurance for fans of Reeder as we know it: it isn’t going anywhere. The previous version, Reeder 5, has been renamed Reeder Classic and remains available on the App Store. In fact, Rizzi intends to continue developing Reeder Classic in conjunction with the new version.

The last thing I wanted to mention is that a couple days ago I expressed some anxiety around the Reeder I love being “demoted” to “Classic”. To be clear, it’s totally normal for developers to have multiple apps in their lineup and I don’t have an issue with that at all. Hell, Rizzi already makes Mela, a rad recipe manager! What concerned me is that a new app that didn’t click for me had taken over the name of the app I loved. It felt like the app I loved was being put into a legacy status with the “classic” moniker. “Reeder Classic remains a product in our lineup,” if you will. Like I said, there aren’t a bunch of features I hope are added to Reeder Classic, so I’m fine if it goes on the back-burner, I just hope it continues to get support for the latest operating systems so I can keep using it how I do now for many years to come.

For reasons that are uninteresting, my work Mac is stuck using Reeder 4, and while it still works on macOS Sonoma, it becomes more buggy by the update. My fear was that Reeder Classic was going to suffer that same slow decline, but Rizzi has said that’s not the plan, so consider me optimistic. Maybe I’ll even give the new Reeder another chance and see if there is some spot for it in my life, even if the Classic app continues to solve my RSS needs. I’m sure I’ll talk about it on Comfort Zone one of these days 😉