Apple removes RSS readers Fiery Feeds and Reeder from the iOS App Store in China in a new crackdown from censors
- The new removals come three years after Apple removed popular RSS readers Feedly and Inoreader from the Chinese App Store
- Apple has been repeatedly called out for complying with the Chinese government’s censorship requests
Fiery Feeds and Reeder both acknowledged on Twitter that their iOS apps had been removed in the country. They cited a 2017 tweet by Inoreader, another popular RSS service, which posted a letter from Apple saying its app was removed in China because it included content that is illegal in the country. Inoreader said the entire service was blocked in April this year.
RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a popular way of pulling updates from news sites, blogs and other content producers and compiling it all in one place. The popularity of RSS started to decline as people began spending more time on social media.
In China, though, RSS readers still provide some people with a unique service: avoiding the Great Firewall. Some cloud-based RSS readers store the content on their own servers, which might not be blocked in China.
Despite its utility, the use of RSS feeds was never widely adopted in China. This is partly because China has been cracking down on RSS feeds at least since 2007, a few years after the Great Firewall got up and running. Fiery Feeds only had about 1,000 monthly active users in China before the iOS app was removed this week, TechCrunch reported.
The few users who did rely on RSS in China are now lamenting the new crackdown.