![\"Public](\"/assets/2025/08/21/PublicBeta.jpg\")
\nmacOS: Pressing Tab in the sidebar now correctly moves keyboard focus to the content list; Shift+Tab moves focus back.Elytra v2026.2.0 delivers a fresh Liquid Glass look, performance improvements, and deeper customization for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.
\nIf you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.
\ndata-src and data-posterElytra's Black Friday deals will become available starting on the 28th of November, and will run through 4 December, 2025.
\nSimply follow the relevant link listed below:
\n\nHappy Holidays!
\n", "date_published": "2025-11-28T01:51:00.000+00:00"}, { "id": "https://elytra.app/blog/2025/10/01/swift-new-era-for-elytra/", "url": "https://elytra.app/blog/2025/10/01/swift-new-era-for-elytra/", "title": "Swift New Era for Elytra", "content_html": "Just a few weeks ago, I wrote about a decade of working on Elytra, however, the last epoch per my own writings was way back in 2018.
\nEvery major milestone of Elytra has been noted down by me as an epoch, with the exception of the Mac app launch. There is a minor app update release available today on the App Store, but this post isn't about that. It's about Swift, Apple's premiere programming language for its platforms, but also for servers and server-side work.
\n2015: Around this time, I was very familiar with JavaScript, NodeJS, etc. so that was my obvious choice for writing Elytra's APIs and Poller process. Just a few years in, and I began to notice how unwieldy the project had gotten, partly due to my inexperience, as well as NodeJS' single thread limitations. Swift 1.0 had already been available for a year by this time.
\n2018: Elytra's APIs and processes had been running stable on a few micro sized servers on AWS, requiring infrequent maintenance from me. I had automated away a bunch of routine tasks using cronjobs, and could focus mostly on the iOS app and soon to come macOS app built using Mac Catalyst.
\n2020: The global pandemic era was upon us all, and I had more free time than usual, so I decided to finally rewrite Elytra for macOS using AppKit. Elytra's API didn't have to change, I didn't need to write any special endpoints for the Mac app, so once again, I didn't have to do anything to the API. This is also when I decided to fully migrate Elytra's apps from Objective-C to Swift 5.5, which had now attained ABI stability a year ago.
\n2021: This was the pivotal point. Around then, I began tinkering with the idea of UIPredicateEditor, a drop-in class replacement for NSPredicateEditor on iOS. I'd been working with Swift for over a year now, and its type-safety paradigms is what really made it stick with me. After looking around for a bit, Vapor seemed like a great fit for Elytra's future API endpoints. And that's what I started to use for writing the relevant API endpoints for supporting the Smart Folders feature.
2023: In just two years, majority of the traffic coming to Elytra's servers was equally split between the older NodeJS server and the newer Swift server. It was very clear, Swift on server was the future for Elytra's APIs, however, this also meant I would have to transition all API endpoints currently being used by the apps to the newer system, and there were a lot of them. Elytra's pollers was also migrated to use Swift around the same time iOS 17 and macOS 14 were released. The new poller was infinitely more faster, stable, and easily debugged.
\n2024: Around WWDC24, and with the release of iOS 18, and macOS 15, majority of the traffic was being handled by a single server running the Swift binary of Elytra's APIs. Vapor has matured by now, and Swift 6.0 is upon us bringing improved concurrency not only for the apps, but also to server-side programming. This was huge milestone, for all parties involved, including myself. I can now confidently write new API endpoints, while keeping similar logic structure I wrote for the NodeJS APIs (Promises, async/await was a thing in NodeJS for a while).
\n2025: I was determined to have one of the last releases of Elytra in 2025 to fully use APIs running on the Swift server. By the time iOS 26 and macOS 26 released, and Elytra's v2025.9 update, only four API endpoints remained on the older NodeJS server which were still being used: two of these were major, OPML import and export, one of the keystones of any good RSS feed reader app.
\nWell, determined as I was, in September 2025, I migrated these, and a lot more on the server, to fully use Swift 6.2, and all the interesting concurrency features it brings. Elytra's latest release v2025.10 is now fully powered by a Swift backend. As of writing this post, Elytra is 99.9% Swift, with the 0.01% Objective-C for a few NSString related magic which Elytra's text rendering engine still relies on for better performance.
From a poorly managed NodeJS project to a hardened, well-documented, and performant server written fully in Swift, this transformation has been nothing short of metamorphosis. Back in May 2025, the amazing folks over at CulturedCloud also announced, Things Cloud now fully runs on Swift.
\nI echo their choice of Swift, and it just makes sense:
\n\n\nSwift has become Apple’s flagship programming language for building modern apps, and over the years we’ve adopted it for much of the code in Things itself. It is fast, safe, and expressive. So four years ago, when we set out to rebuild Things Cloud, we saw a promising opportunity: to use Swift on the server, too.
\n
But more importantly:
\n\n\n…Apple had shown a strong commitment to server-side Swift, and there was a growing open-source community.
\n
Apple has been sponsoring server-side Swift conferences for a while now, and that injects enthusiasm and confidence like nothing else. In contrast to what CulturedCode was doing, switching from one system to another overnight, Elytra had a different approach. Using date versioned API endpoints, I could write new, faster, sync endpoints for the apps' new releases, while maintaining compatibility for prior releases. This is important as older releases of Elytra are still being used by customers on their supported devices, and I have no intentions to stop the app from functioning for them. This is a very small percentage of users, so I don't mind it either.
\nAs the tech stack for Elytra evolves over the next few years, so will its backend services and apps, simultaneously, utilising the improved code-sharing these three platforms can now achieve, thanks to Swift on iOS, macOS, and on the server.
\n", "date_published": "2025-10-01T02:45:00.000+00:00"}, { "id": "https://elytra.app/blog/2025/09/12/v2025-9-0-for-ios-and-macos/", "url": "https://elytra.app/blog/2025/09/12/v2025-9-0-for-ios-and-macos/", "title": "September 2025 Release", "content_html": "Elytra v2025.9.0 delivers a fresh Liquid Glass look, performance improvements, and deeper customization for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26.
\nIf you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.
\nmacOS: Article reader improvements: horizontal insets, reading width calibration, and toolbar scroll effects.macOS: URL schemes work reliably again, plus better icon, favicon, and folder assignment.macOS: Fixed custom font handling within the article reader.The notaried build for this release is also available to download from Github.
\n", "date_published": "2025-09-12T01:20:00.000+00:00","banner_image": "https://elytra.app/assets/images/home/screens-1200w.png"}, { "id": "https://elytra.app/blog/2025/08/21/a-decade-of-elytra/", "url": "https://elytra.app/blog/2025/08/21/a-decade-of-elytra/", "title": "A Decade of Elytra", "content_html": "In July of 2015, Google Reader had been shut down for two years now. The need for a good reader app and service wasn't filled by most alternatives available then. I'd been thinking of building one myself, but it felt like a massive undertaking. And I was very specific with what I wanted from such an app:
\nEvery single offering out there in 2015 only ticked one or two of these three primary criteria. And so, Elytra, code named Yeti started to take shape with its first usable build ready in August of 2015. In two months, I had functional prototypes of the API and the iOS app and sent out an alpha build to friends to try out.
I did not realise what I'd gotten myself into: 10 years of tinkering, tweaking, learning, unlearning, and updates. It did however take me just under three years to really nail the text and image rendering in the app: I decided not to use a web view. Remember the privacy aspect? I didn't want the app to collect any personally identifiable data. I wanted to take this a step further and prevent ad and tracking services from doing so as well. And natively rendering text, and especially images, was the only way to do it, bypassing script, noscript, and pixel tracking images.
The API service for Elytra was written in NodeJS, ExpressJS with a MySQL store for data storage. A pretty simple stack.
\nAnd in July 2018, here we go!
\n\n![\"Elytra](\"/assets/2025/08/21/Heading.png\")
\nSlowly over the next few years, the app was refined, bringing improved accessibility support and features and eventually the Mac app was released, first using MacCatalyst, then finally with AppKit with the release of macOS 11.0.
\n![\"Top:](\"https://elytra.app/assets/2020/11/Artboard-scaled.jpg\")
This also brought the use of TextKit2 for rendering text in articles, which brought its own advantages and headaches over time:
\n![\"Single](\"https://elytra.app/assets/2020/11/Screenshot-2020-11-14-at-6.25.22-PM.png\")
During the pandemic years, third party services Elytra relied on started to shut down one by one. The most critical one was Mercury: A full-text extraction service for the web. This was bad news for me, as I had no idea how to build one myself, quickly enough to reduce and negate downtime for users of Elytra.
\nUnfortunately, this took me a while, and five months later, Neptune was released. I had a lot of angry customers demanding refunds during this period, and while most understood the situation once I explained it to them, some went as far as to threaten me and my family. I didn't ever understand how those threats were viable, so I continued to focus on the app and its users who still cared for it.
\nI wanted to champion Elytra into a app in a class of its own: Private, Accessible, Simple. And people noticed, the right kind of people noticed. People who cared for a well crafted app began to migrate over from other apps and services. I soon started getting invites from the fruit company to attend sessions on improving my app, and even talking about it on several occasions, especially on the accessibility support the app brings forth for its users.
\nIt's climbed the ranks of the App Store and Mac App Store on several occasions, including features by itself and in collections. It's been everything I could ask for, and then some more, and I'm truly grateful for everything I've learned through the app over these 10 years.
\nThese ten years of Elytra have been dominated by "flat design" first seen with iOS 7. And the next 10 years, probably, are going to witness the adoption of the "Liquid Glass" paradigm. I'm truly excited for this shift: I've never been good with flatness in design, it never truly echoed with me in the way interaction with digital materials do. Being a gamer, I've always found digital textures fascinating, with developers going to great lengths to bring forth an interaction mimicking the real world in some way, has always reminded of the first TRON movie.
\nElytra's backed has also been completely transformed: It now mostly uses Swift, Vapor, and the same ol' MySQL store. But it's now more than one thing: It's a bunch of services running simultaneously, in perfect concert with each other, being invisible to users. From Objective-C and JavaScript in 2015, to Swift 6.2 in 2025, Elytra has metamorphosed staying true to its name and app icon.
\n![\"Evolution](\"/assets/2025/08/21/ElytraAppIcons.png\")
\nHere's to the next decade of Elytra, and to all the new engineering challenges it will bring me. To end this post, I'll leave you with a sneak peek of the upcoming release of Elytra v2025.9, scheduled for simultaneous release with iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26.
\n![\"Elytra](\"/assets/2025/08/21/1.png\")
\n![\"Elytra](\"/assets/2025/08/21/2.png\")
\n",
"date_published": "2025-08-20T18:30:00.000+00:00"},
{
"id": "https://elytra.app/blog/2024/09/16/v2024-9-0-for-ios-and-macos/",
"url": "https://elytra.app/blog/2024/09/16/v2024-9-0-for-ios-and-macos/",
"title": "September 2024.9 Release",
"content_html": "The September 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.
\nIf you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.
\niOS: New App Icons: Elytra now offers Light, Dark, and Tinted app icons, giving you even more customization options to match your style.macOS: Context Menu for Images: You can now access the context menu for images, offering download and share options.macOS: Feed Delete Prompt: A new preference allows you to control whether the app should prompt for confirmation when deleting a feed.macOS: Bulk Delete for Feeds: Added a bulk delete option in the context menu when selecting multiple feeds.macOS: Bulk Selection for Articles: The articles list now supports bulk selection with actions like Mark as Read/Unread, Bookmark, and Redownload.macOS: Gallery Image Handling: Double-click on images to open them in Quick Look for a faster, more immersive viewing experience.macOS: Sidebar Stability: The sidebar now maintains open folder states when reloading, ensuring a smoother experience.macOS: App Update Check: Fixed an issue where the app would not check for updates on launch. You can still manually update via the "Check for Updates..." menu.The April 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.
\nIf you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.
\nThe v2024.4.1 release brings further improvements and bug fixes to the April '24 release.
\nFixed bug where local feed preferences were sometimes overwritten during sync.
\nFixed a bug where the app would sometimes crash when syncing the background.
\niOS: Fixed a bug where the sync progress bar would immediately dismiss after sync completed. It now shows the completed state for a second before resetting its state.
iOS: Fixed opening article in standalone window on iPadOS
macOS: Fixed show article covers from enclosures, matches iOS/iPadOS app now
Fixed a crashing bug that would sometimes occur when adding a new feed.
\nFixed syncing of feed updates and changes across devices.
\nImproved sync: changes to feeds and folders are now picked up before syncing articles begins.
\nFixed a bug where article enclosures would not get saved properly to disk.
\nFixed a bug where articles with no explict cover image assigned, would show no cover image, if it had an image enclosure.
\nFixed a bug where article enclosures without any articles would linger around consuming disk space. These are now cleaned up when the app starts.
\niOS: Fixed split view behaviour on iPads
The notaried build for this release is also available to download from Github.
\n", "date_published": "2024-04-23T02:30:00.000+00:00"}, { "id": "https://elytra.app/blog/2024/04/15/v2024-4-for-ios-and-macos/", "url": "https://elytra.app/blog/2024/04/15/v2024-4-for-ios-and-macos/", "title": "April 2024 Release", "content_html": "The April 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.
\nIf you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.
\nFixed a crashing bug that would sometimes occur when adding a new feed.
\nFixed syncing of feed updates and changes across devices.
\nImproved sync: changes to feeds and folders are now picked up before syncing articles begins.
\nFixed a bug where article enclosures would not get saved properly to disk.
\nFixed a bug where articles with no explict cover image assigned, would show no cover image, if it had an image enclosure.
\nFixed a bug where article enclosures without any articles would linger around consuming disk space. These are now cleaned up when the app starts.
\niOS: Fixed split view behaviour on iPads
The notaried build for this release is also available to download from Github.
\n", "date_published": "2024-04-15T00:30:00.000+00:00"}, { "id": "https://elytra.app/blog/2024/02/06/v2024-2-for-ios-and-macos/", "url": "https://elytra.app/blog/2024/02/06/v2024-2-for-ios-and-macos/", "title": "February 2024 Release", "content_html": "The February 2024 release brings a improvements and bug fixes to both the iOS and mac apps.
\nIf you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.
\nFixed taking changes from folder updates (feeds added, removed)
\nFixed feed local metadata not persisting
\nFixed loading favicons
\nFixed local notifications title and body being swapped. Title articles/excerpts will now be readable.
\nFixed a bug where adding/deleting feeds would require an app restart for it to take effect.
\nmacOS: Added Internet Access Policy
The notaried build for this release is also available to download from Github.
\n", "date_published": "2024-02-06T03:30:00.000+00:00"} ] }