Indie App Spotlight: 'Headlines' offers a news reading experience that isn't tiring

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Keeping up with the news can often be exhausting. Headlines offers a clean experience that puts your favorite writers and publications front and center. It’s available on iPhone, iPad, and has a web app.

Top features

First and foremost, you can create your own feed. Headlines offers you a plethora of genres to pick from during onboarding, then within each genre you can pick your favorite publications. You can search for more later, but this creates the basis of your feed – allowing you to keep in touch with the stories you care about, rather than being served by an algorithm.

Second, the app offers something I don’t often see: the ability to follow individual writers. This can be useful if one author at a publication often posts scoops you care about, but you aren’t quite interested in seeing everything else published by a certain site.

Outside of the things you choose to follow, Headlines also makes it easy to find new publications and stories through its Discover feature.

To put the cherry on top, Headlines makes it easy to organize everything with its built in collections feature, allowing you to sort various sites into categories that make sense for you.

Headlines is available for free on the App Store for the core experience. For premium features like News Flash – which lets you keeps up with notifications, as well as having no limits on who you can follow, you can purchase Headlines Pro for $3.99/month or $44.99/year. You’ll need an iPhone or iPad running iOS 18 or later.

You can follow Headlines on Twitter, Bluesky, or Threads for updates.

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