Jake Spurlock: Introducing Today: An RSS Reader for the Modern Age

I’m thrilled to announce the release of Today, a new RSS reader for iOS that I’ve been building with a lot of love and a little help from AI.

A Love Letter to RSS

I’ve loved RSS forever. It’s the open web at its finest—a way to follow the sites and writers you care about without algorithmic interference, without ads dictating what you see, without being locked into a single platform. When Google shut down Google Reader in 2013, it left a hole in my heart that never quite healed. I tried every replacement under the sun, but none of them felt quite right.

So I decided to build my own.

RSS at Automattic

This week, I hit my seven-year anniversary at Automattic, where RSS feeds are part of our daily workflow. We use them to stay on top of news, monitor site updates, track support issues, and keep connected to the broader WordPress community. RSS isn’t just a nostalgic technology for us—it’s an essential tool.

Coincidentally, my seven-year anniversary fell on the same day as Matt Mullenweg’s twenty-year anniversary of founding WordPress and Automattic. As he reflected on two decades of building in the open, I found myself thinking about what it means to create tools that empower people, that respect the open web, and that put users in control of their own experience.

That’s what Today is all about.

From WordPress to Swift: Porting Texturize

One of my favorite technical achievements in this project was porting WordPress’s texturize function to Swift. For those unfamiliar, texturize is the unsung hero that transforms plain ASCII quotes into beautiful curly quotes, fixes dashes, and handles all those typographic niceties that make text look polished and professional.

WordPress has been perfecting this code for over twenty years, handling edge cases in dozens of languages. Rather than reinvent the wheel, I brought that wisdom into Today. Now your RSS article titles look as good on iOS as they do on the web.

AI, But Just a Little (And All Local)

Here’s where Today gets interesting. I’ve added AI features—but deliberately kept them minimal, focused, and completely local to your device. No cloud processing, no data collection, no privacy concerns.

The AI does two things:

• Context and summaries: When you have dozens of unread articles, Today can generate a quick newsletter-style digest with commentary, helping you understand what’s worth reading right now.
• Surface interesting articles: Ask the AI what you should read, what’s trending, or what’s new, and it’ll point you to the articles that matter most based on your reading habits.

It’s just enough AI to be helpful without being overwhelming. And because it runs entirely on-device using Apple Intelligence, your reading habits stay private.

Built for the Open Web

Today is my attempt to bring back what made Google Reader great: a clean, focused reading experience that puts you in control. Import your feeds via OPML, organize them however you like, and enjoy reading without distractions.

The app supports background sync, so your feeds stay fresh throughout the day. It handles both RSS and Atom feeds. And yes, it works beautifully with WordPress sites—because of course it does.

Download Today

Today is available now on the App Store for iOS 18 and later. It’s free to download, and I’d love to hear what you think.

Whether you’re an RSS veteran who never stopped missing Google Reader, or someone discovering the power of RSS feeds for the first time, I think you’ll find something to love in Today.

Here’s to the open web. Here’s to reader-controlled algorithms. And here’s to RSS, still going strong after all these years.

Download Today on the App Store →

P.S. If you’re curious about the technical details, I built Today using SwiftUI and SwiftData, with Apple’s NaturalLanguage framework powering the local AI features. The whole project is a love letter to both RSS and native iOS development.