Tapestry is the Best Feed Reader Yet, and it Brings Twitterrific Nostalgia to Boot
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Today the legendary development team at The Iconfactory finally released their long awaited feed reading app: Tapestry. I had regretted not contributing to the Kickstarter campaign, but man am I glad more than enough other folks did. Tapestry is a great app. It feels modern and new but has clear echoes of Twitterrific all throughout. Twitterrific was one of my all-time favorite apps. As someone obviously addicted to microblogging, my interest in these client apps stems way back to the earliest days of the App Store. Like I imagine many of you did too, I tried as many Twitter clients back in the day as possible. But Twitterrific consistently ranked in the top two right alongside Tweetbot. Between the two clients, Twitterrific was always more opinionated with unique font choices, themes, and interface layouts. The app was also generally ahead of the times too, in fact it was one of the earliest to adopt a āflatā user interface before iOS 7. It was a phenomenal app and I miss it a lot, which is why I am glad Tapestry exists. Itās obviously early days, the app is read-only for example. But it is customizable, colorful, and fast as all hell just like Twitterrific was. Even the default font and the shape of profile photos remind me of the options offered in Twitterrific.
Tapestry lets you read your Bluesky feed, Mastodon feed, RSS feeds, YouTube feeds, sub Reddits, and more. Sound a bit familiar? Thatās probably because of the new Reeder by Silvio Rizzi. It is the successor to the iconic Reeder RSS app with boatloads of other feed options as well. Iāve used it on and off since it launched last year, but it has its shortcomings. Despite being beautifully designed, Iāve always found it to be slow to load new content and different pieces of that content werenāt differentiated enough. Tapestry solved all of my problems with the new Reeder. It loads quickly, it uses different colors to differentiate between source feeds on each post, and the density can be customized. Itās just a better app. Itās also free to use, a massive differentiator. The app serves some ads and isnāt as customizable without a subscription. But if you donāt want to pay (though I recommend it because the app is even better when you do) you can get all of the core functionality. If you do subscribe, it does happen to be twice as much as Reeder however. $1.99/month or $19.99/year compared to Reederās $1/month or $10/year. I think itās worth it though. Never been a better or more important time to support indie developers.