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Is there a free feed reader with push notifications for iPhone? I am looking to receive a push notification every time a new post appears in a feed. The reasoning and the use case are explained in this question.

Some of the apps I have already tried or read about:

  • Boxcar: Discontinued.

  • Hooks: Does not allow me to specify custom feed links. They have their own feeds.

  • LetMeKnow: Requires monthly subscription fee.

  • Inoreader: Requires monthly subscription fee.

  • Newsify: I registered Stack Overflow JavaScript question feed, the app did not send me any push notifications. (There is a new post almost every minute). Somewhere in the app it says:

    Background sync is controlled by iOS, which prioritizes apps that you open more often. So, you may need to use Newsify manually for a week or more for background sync and notifications to start.

    I am not sure what that means but I do not think those are the push notifications I am looking for. Other apps that send push notifications do not wait one week before notifying.

  • Blogkeen: They claim that they have push notifications. Again I have added the Stack Overflow JavaScript feed. Did not receive one notification. Should be at least once per minute.

  • IFTTT: Not sure how this will work? Still investigating.

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    There are other blogs that asked the same question: reddit, Quora, xda, macrumors
    – Hakan Baba
    Aug 16, 2017 at 5:19
  • I want this too. But so far, I can only contribute another dud - I installed Breaking because the spiel sounded like it could do what you ask, but it actually doesn't. I also vaguely remember trying out Feedly.
    – tripleee
    Aug 29, 2017 at 16:16

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I discovered https://tickers.cc/ and so far, it works for me.

screen shot of notifications on phone's lock screen a notification arrived while I was composing this post

However, setting up a new ticker is rather cumbersome. In brief, you have to create a "ticker", then a "channel" within that, and fill in a number of mandatory fields (including a logo! So I now have a number of SE site logos in my camera roll in case I need them again) and finally (aggravatingly) separately add yourself as a subscriber, and add push notifications for it. But after that, it mostly works.

The ticker sleeps between polls, so for a busy tag like Javascript, you get a batch of notifications pretty much every time it polls the feed. The polling interval is apparently 10 minutes (I have not found a way to configure this).

The default sound is a bit too sharp for my ears, but that's easy to change (though there seems to be a bug there in the current version; it beeps even though I turned off the sound. But I was able to revoke notification sound privileges for this app from the phone's notification settings).

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  • Adding and then removing a ticker produced some odd glitches but I wasn't able to repro.
    – tripleee
    Sep 17, 2017 at 13:38
  • In case you're wondering about the swipe keyboard in the second screenshot, that's MessagEase. It's not perfect but it reduced my screen keyboard swearing by something like 70%.
    – tripleee
    Sep 17, 2017 at 13:41
  • Does the latency vary around 10 minutes? Have you seen less, more? I have played around with IFTTT and pushover. There, the latency is arund 5-6 minutes on average. I have seen as fast as 1 minute and the slowest was at 15 min. Will post an answer about that setup here too.
    – Hakan Baba
    Sep 18, 2017 at 13:35
  • Yeah, I saw it announce something happened 5 min ago and the push notioes often appeared 11 min apart. I don't have detailed observations but now that you asked, I can say this much.
    – tripleee
    Sep 18, 2017 at 13:58
  • Unfortunately, this app is no longer available from the App Store.
    – tripleee
    Nov 23, 2018 at 6:03

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