Elytra Blog

The simple RSS Reader. This blog publishes release notes, engineering and design details.

Elytra v2.6 is now available

The first release of 2022 is here and brings some incredible performance enhancements to Elytra. This is the culmination of all the work I put into the app’s engine in 2021.

If you feel generous and have a couple of minutes, please leave a review on the App Store. It makes a huge difference for me. Thank you in advance.

Here’s what’s new and changed in v2.6.0:

New

  • Moved to a new of storage engine (Apple’s own) which is much faster, reliable and will help implement a lot of the upcoming features in Elytra.
  • New Small widget that shows the latest unread article from a single feed of your choice.
  • New onboarding flow
  • The app is now localised for 10 languages. If you spot any mistakes in the text translations, please get in touch.
  • Reset Account: You can now reset parts of or your entire account without having to create a new account.
  • Added Source Han Serif font for improved support in CJK articles.
  • macOS: Added a “Reset App” item under preferences.

Improved

  • Notifications will now include the cover image if the article includes one.
  • Major improvements to handling and managing subscriptions in the app. See note below if subscriptions data fails to sync.
  • Widgets now directly load data from the common data store, so they update much faster and sync more reliably.
  • macOS: Added Internet Access Policy items to give descriptive messages of connections in apps like LittleSnitch and MicroSnitch.
  • macOS: Fixed spacing for items in Preferences.
  • macOS: Improved full-screen support for videos in Big Sur. Toggling full-screen on a video will now open it in the OS’s fullscreen, not limited to the app window’s area.

Fixes

  • Fixed a bug where favicons would sometimes never load for a feed even with a valid URL.
  • Fixed loading indicator showing when no where articles available (after switching sorting order).
  • Opening articles from feeds with reader mode enabled now works across all article list types (unread, today, folder…)
  • Fixed a crash that would occur on opening certain articles with deeply nested content.
  • Fixed a critical range overflow bug when applying attributes to paragraph content.
  • Fixed a bug where toolbar article navigation buttons would not update after changing the article.

Temporary Removals

Due to some bugs in modern systems, the following have been temporarily disabled:

  • Hide bars on scroll (iOS and iPadOS)
  • Search on macOS

If you notice any translation errors, please feel free to reach out to me on support@elytra.app. I’m continuously working with wonderful people who are helping with translating the app and introduce new languages to Elytra. If you’d like to help, you can check out the instructions here.

Notes

If you see continuous errors when fetching information about subscriptions, purchasing or restoring: please check if you have a custom DNS blocker enabled on your device. Some of these prevent connections to the service Elytra now uses to manage subscriptions. You may have unblock api.revenuecat.com in your DNS blocker settings to get things to work.

Elytra 2022 LTS Plan

This post outlines the Long Term Support (or LTS for short) plan for current and upcoming releases:

iOS:

  • v2.6.x is scheduled to be released soon and will be the last version to support iOS 14.0–14.7.

  • v2.7.0 will support iOS 15.0 and later only.

  • If any critical fixes are required for iOS 14.x support, they will be released in the 2.6.x pipeline.

macOS:

  • v2.6.x is scheduled to be released soon ad will be the last version to support macOS 11.0 (Big Sur).

  • v2.7.0 will support macOS 12.0 and later only.

  • If any critical fixes are required for macOS 11.x support, they will be released in the 2.6.x pipeline.

Timelines

The v2.6.x pipeline will continue to receive critical fixes, if any are necessary, for up to 6 months after v2.6.0 is released. After that date, no critical fixes will be issued and LTS support will end for those releases.

Hopefully with the release of v2.7.0, the LTS support will span for longer durations considering more features being supported now in iOS 15 and macOS 12.

If you have any questions about the LTS plan, feel free to get in touch with me over email.