When I first built Today, the goal was simple: bring back the joy of RSS. No algorithms, no tracking, just your feeds in chronological order. But RSS has always been more than articles—it’s how podcasts were born.
Podcasts are just RSS feeds with audio enclosures. It’s elegant, really. The same open standard that delivers your morning news can stream a two-hour interview. So it felt natural to add podcast support to Today.
Podcast Playback
Version 1.9 adds full podcast support. Subscribe to any podcast RSS feed and episodes appear alongside your articles. Tap to stream with a proper Now Playing experience—artwork, progress scrubbing, and speed control from 0.5x to 2x.
If the podcast includes chapters (via ID3 tags), you’ll see them. Tap to jump. Some shows even include chapter-specific artwork, which Today displays as you listen.
Background playback works as expected. Lock your phone, switch apps, put it in your pocket—the audio keeps going. Control Center and Lock Screen controls let you pause, skip, and scrub without opening the app.
Reddit Without the Reddit App
One of the features I’m most proud of is native Reddit support. Type a subreddit name—just “baseball” or “utahinfluencerdrama”—and Today handles the rest. No account required.
The trick was moving beyond Reddit’s basic RSS feeds. Those give you titles and links, but not much else. Today uses Reddit’s JSON endpoints instead, which unlocks everything: author names, animated GIFs, multi-image galleries with pinch-to-zoom, embedded videos, and full comment threads.
It’s Reddit as a reading experience. No infinite scroll, no algorithmic feed, no ads. Just the communities you subscribe to, in chronological order.
JSON Feed Support
Today also supports JSON Feed, the modern alternative to RSS and Atom. If a site publishes a JSON feed, Today will parse it just like any other subscription. It’s cleaner to work with than XML (sorry, RSS purists) and increasingly common on developer blogs and indie sites.
AI That Stays on Your Device
Today uses Apple Intelligence (iOS 26+) for article summaries, daily newsletters, and answering questions about your feeds. All processing happens on-device—your reading habits never leave your phone. On older devices, Today falls back to Apple’s NaturalLanguage framework for basic summarization.
The Technical Bits
Podcast RSS feeds use <enclosure> tags for audio files and iTunes extensions for metadata like duration and artwork. Today parses these alongside standard RSS elements, so podcasts and articles live together in your feed.
Chapter support required extracting ID3 metadata from MP3 files. Rather than download entire episodes upfront, Today uses HTTP range requests to fetch just the ID3 header. Chapters load in the background while you browse.
I also fixed OPML import compatibility with NetNewsWire, Feedflow, Stream, and Feeder. If you’re migrating from another reader, your subscriptions should transfer cleanly now.
Still Privacy-First
Nothing has changed about how Today handles your data. Subscriptions stay on your device. There’s no account, no sync service, no analytics. Your reading and listening habits are yours alone.
Get It
Today 1.9 is free on the App Store for iOS 18 and later.
If you’re enjoying the app, a rating helps more than you’d think. And if something’s broken, open an issue—I read them all.
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