I don’t like reading newsletters in my email inbox, since that’s also the place where I get all kinds of distracting messages and ads. If you’re looking for an app that lets you set up an email address and read newsletters elsewhere for free, Omnivore is a great choice. Its primary function is as a read-later app, where you can save articles and read them at your leisure, but it also lets you subscribe to and read newsletters for free.
Omnivore is great at saving articles
Omnivore supports all major browsers via extensions and it has apps for iPhone, Mac, and Android. On browser, just install the extension and save articles with a single click. On your smartphone, install the app and use the share sheet quickly send links right to Omnivore. This sharing workflow allows you to add notes and tags to the things you save, which allows you to organize your reading material while saving. I use this a lot to separate articles I save for work from those I save for enjoyment.
Credit: Pranay Parab
I also tried saving LinkedIn posts to the app and it handled them reasonably well. In some places, it added extra line breaks for no reason, but the reading experience was otherwise smooth. It does save a lot of LinkedIn comments, too.
Omnivore keeps your reading organized
I’m quite impressed by the organization features in Omnivore. For an app that has your RSS feeds, newsletters, and saved articles all in one spot, it’s essential to have this. The left pane shows you useful options such as Non-Feed Items, which highlights only manually saved articles, Highlights, and Newsletters. It’s also quite easy to sort through tagged articles, and all tags are available under the Labels section in the left pane.
This helps me focus only on what I want to read and keeps the app from becoming overwhelming. While these options are great on the browser and iPhone app, the Mac app doesn’t show these tags and organization options. As a basic reader app, Omnivore’s Mac app is fine, but the best features are available on the web version.
The reader is beautiful
Omnivore’s reader looks great. It lets you change the font size, margins, line height, and has a few different font and theme options. I prefer dark mode, which the app defaults to, but you can choose a light theme, sepia, or a gray background too. A few more reading options are available in the advanced settings pane, where you can choose to use high contrast text, change the justify alignment, and more.
Credit: Pranay Parab
Omnivore lets you access a few advanced options, too. For example, you can edit the title of the article, its author, and description. This is great if you want to replace clickbait headlines or if Omnivore accidentally displays incorrect information. I’m not a huge note-taker, but if you are, the app allows you to add highlights and make notes while you’re reading. This could be useful if you’re using the app to study, because it saves your highlights and lets you quickly browse through just your highlights.
Setting up newsletters and RSS feeds
Omnivore gives you a free email address, which you can use to sign up for any newsletter and even send files to Omnivore. For example, a friend sent their short story to me in a PDF file and I forwarded their email to Omnivore. I was able to read the story in the read-later app. This is a great feature to have in a free app, and it works quite well.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t add RSS feeds to the app at all. I tried this in desktop browsers and on the iPhone app, but the app showed an error and didn’t show anything from the four or five feeds I tried to add. That’s not a dealbreaker, because I have the excellent NetNewsWire set up as my feed reader, but it’s disappointing that an advertised feature doesn’t work quite as well.
The business model
With any hosted service that’s totally free, I always worry about the privacy and the future of the service itself. At the moment, Omnivore’s pricing model is free because of donations from the community. I’m less worried about privacy with Omnivore as it’s an open-source project that you’re free to fork and setup on your own server if you like. The developers say they plan to add a few premium add-ons to the service in the future, and hopefully that’s good enough to sustain the app.
Omnivore is a good product and I hope it can find a sustainable business model to be around for a long time to come.
