News apps that stop being one column
Every feed reader ever designed has three panes — sources, headlines, article — and every phone version has spent its life pretending it has one. This is the category whose proper layout has existed for decades and has never fitted.
Reading a feed is a sorting job before it is a reading job. You scan a list, pick something, read it, come back, and the coming back is where a phone costs you: each step is a push and a pop, and your place in the list is something the app has to remember on your behalf. The three-pane layout exists precisely so that none of that is necessary, and a screen that opens is the first time a phone can draw it.
So the order runs by how much of the app is a list. The RSS readers go first, because a river of headlines is the thing most improved by being beside what you are reading rather than behind it. The publishers' own apps follow, where the layout is designed around their own pages. The timeline at the end is there because a social feed is a river too, just one that never ends.
Nothing here needs the fold to function. All of it currently works by hiding two thirds of itself.
- 1
Reeder Classic
Silvio Rizzi
RSS and read-later in one app with iCloud syncing, by the developer's description, and the direct descendant of the three-pane reader this category was built around. Folded it is a stack of screens; unfolded it is the layout it was always drawn as.
- 2
NetNewsWire: RSS Reader
Brent Simmons
Free, open source, and deliberately plain — a feed reader that does feeds and declines to become a recommendation engine. The absence of an algorithm means the list is the interface, and a list is the thing that most wants a column of its own.
- 3
Feedly - Smart News Reader
Feedly Inc.
The feed reader most people land on when they want the subscriptions to live on somebody's server rather than their device. Same three-pane argument, with the sources organised into groups that are easier to use when you can see them.
- 4
Flipboard: The Social Magazine
Flipboard, Inc.
News arranged as a magazine, with topics followed rather than sites subscribed to. It is the entry whose design has always borrowed from print, and print layouts are the ones that need page-shaped space to land.
- 5
Apple News
Apple Distribution International
Curated and personalised, already installed, and carrying publishers who are not elsewhere. The reading experience is laid-out pages rather than plain text, which means it gains from the fold in the way a magazine does rather than the way a feed does.
- 6
Google News
Google LLC
An aggregator that groups a story across the outlets covering it. Comparing coverage is the feature, and comparison is the thing you cannot do one screen at a time — it is the whole reason this one is on the list.
- 7
The Guardian - UK & World News
Guardian News & Media Ltd
A publisher's own app, with live blogs as one of its distinctive features. A live blog is a list that updates while you read it, and reading one on a phone means losing your position every time you go back to the top.
- 8
NYTimes: Breaking World News
The New York Times Company
Reporting, video, podcasts and narrated articles in a single app, which is several different shapes of content under one roof. The more shapes, the more the navigation matters, and navigation is what a second pane is for.
- 9
Medium: Read & Write Stories
A Medium Corporation
Long articles from a very wide range of writers, with no layout of its own to speak of beyond the text. Honest placement: it gains a longer line of type and little else, and a longer line of type is still worth having.
- 10
Ivory for Mastodon by Tapbots
Social · Tapbots
Tapbots' Mastodon client, from the people behind Tweetbot, and an app whose desktop ancestors were always several columns wide. A timeline is narrow on a phone by necessity; the extra width is where the design was pointing all along.
The selection and the order are ours. Each entry is written from that app’s own App Store listing, linked beside it, and this page from Apple's iPhone Duo product page. Drafted with AI assistance and checked back against those sources before publishing; the disclosure page explains how. The iPhone Duo has been on sale since 23 October 2026 and nothing here has been seen running on one, so what each entry says about the fold is an argument rather than a test.