I remain a fan of consuming my news via RSS feeds. There are #accessibility and time-saving benefits to getting all your news in one accessible app, and there are no naughty algorithms trying to filter your view of the world.
For many years, I've used Lire as my RSS reader on my iPhone, in conjunction with a feed aggregator service called The Old Reader. Sometime last year, The Old Reader hit a rough patch, but it seemed to have come right, until a couple of months ago.
At that point, I began experiencing serious issues accessing The Old Reader from Lire. Most of the time, Lire would time out. I worked out that if I tried to access the service repeatedly, it usually succeeded on the third or fourth attempt, but that was time-consuming and frustrating. One other person contacted me to let me know he was experiencing the same problem.
I contacted The Old Reader, and they seemed uninterested in pursuing the issue, apparently because they weren't receiving many reports of it.
I contacted the developer of Lire, who couldn't have been more helpful. He asked for my credentials for The Old Reader so he could test with the app, and he duplicated my findings right away. He was able to identify the issue with The Old Reader API that was causing the time-out, and gave this information to The Old Reader, who didn't even acknowledge his message, let alone commit to resolving the issue.
So over the long weekend, I resolved to find a better service. After doing some deep research with ChatGPT, I settled on Bazqux Reader. The website has a few rough edges from an accessibility point of view, but I was able to export my feeds from The Old Reader, import them into Bazqux, and log in via Lire.
The one thing that is very different is the speed. Retrieving article from Bazqux is way faster than The Old Reader ever was, something that my deep research told me I should expect.
So, sadly I can't recommend The Old Reader anymore, but so far so good with Bazqux. Lightning fast and simple setup.
There is a cost for this service, I think about $39 per year, and Lire does support using iCloud to store your feeds. I find that for the large number of feeds I have, a service like Bazqux adds value, but if your requirements are more modest, using iCloud may be sufficient. However you choose to use it, RSS is worth using.