Apple has reportedly removed a pair of RSS reader apps, Reeder and Fiery Feeds, from the App Store in China due to their ability to allow users to access information the country would rather they not see.

It’s not clear exactly what prompted this particular banning, but China has been cracking down on RSS feeds since 2007. That year, it initiated a blanket ban on all web-based RSS feed aggregators. In 2017, Apple removed RSS reader app Inoreader from the App Store in China.

In other words, this may be less a case of “What did Reeder and Fiery Feeds do wrong?” than “how did they manage to survive as long as they did?”

For my job at Cult of Mac, I test a lot of apps. But of course, I also use a lot of apps, for work, for recreation, and for making music. I thought I’d make a short list of my most-used apps this year. Few, if any, of these apps are new this year, although some of them received major updates in 2019. But all of them are excellent, well-made apps, well worth checking out.

So, let’s get started.

This week we view Instagram on the Apple Watch, customize Apple Music, and finally remove those terrible auto-playing previews in Netflix.

How do you read the news? If you do it on Twitter, you’ll be used to missing things as they fly past on your ever-updating timeline. If you read the news on Facebook, you’re being fed articles picked according to Facebook’s own agendas. And if you read the news on regular websites, you spend forever visiting sites just to see if there’s been an update.

If only there was a better way. If only you could open an app and see, at a glance, all the new stories from your favorite websites. Wouldn’t that be something?

The good news is, there are many apps, and many services, that exist to bring you the updates to your favorite sites. They work like Google Reader used to — only way better.

Apple’s News app is pretty great, but only if you’re happy reading stories from Apple-approved sources. There’s plenty of news in the default configuration to keep you going, and you can also dig in and easily pick your own sources and subjects to make it more relevant.

But what about those oddball sites that you read every day? Your favorite ferret-legging forum, for instance? Is there a way to include those in the News app? There used to be, but Apple removed the ability to subscribe to any and all sites somewhere around iOS 10. The goods news is, you can still subscribe to your favorite sites right in Safari’s Shared Links.

It has been months since I opened Reeder, my longtime app of choice for RSS. I don’t have anything personal against Reeder, it’s just that RSS has lost a lot of its appeal for me. Twitter is where I mainly get my news now.

Reeder 2 for Mac, which launches as a public beta today, might just make me give RSS a second chance.

RSS isn’t dead yet. Version 2.0 of Reeder, the highly anticipated sequel to the popular RSS app, has launched in the App Store as a universal download for the iPhone and iPad.

We’re living in a post-Google Reader world now, so Reeder 2 features support for some of the most popular paid and free syncing services: Feedbin, Feedly, Feed Wrangler, Fever, and Readability.

Reeder for iPhone, one of the best Google Reader clients on iOS, just got a new update that introduces support for Feedly and Feed Wrangler. The release comes just a day after Google Reader reached its end, and you can expect the same for Reeder for iPad, and Reeder for Mac in the coming weeks.

The developer behind Reeder, one of the best Google Reader clients for iOS, has confirmed that the app’s development will continue after Google Reader is closed on July 1. The app will soon receive an update which will bring support for a number of Google Reader alternatives, and if that wasn’t enough, it’ll be free on the iPhone starting today.

When Google announced the shut down of Google Reader this past March, Feedly stepped up, promising to create its own Reader-like system for other third party RSS apps to connect to, and thereby lessen the impact of Google’s industry-standard takedown.

In a blog post today, Feedly announced the next step of its plan to rule the RSS landscape with the support of several third party RSS apps, including Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader. I use Reeder on a daily basis on both my Mac and my iPad (which continues to be free until Google Reader actually shuts down its service as of July 1).