As convenient as the internet is, when big tech companies chase endless growth, that can mean bloat. Nowadays, it feels like every company wants to lure me into an algorithm trap, convince me to use their AI services, or try to make me pay a premium to browse like I used to. One of my favorite tools for fighting back against these trends is Tapestry. It’s a timeline app for iPhone and iPad that lets you combine multiple feeds from blogs, YouTube, podcasts, and social media, then view them in chronological order, with a beautiful interface. Essentially, you can use it to make your own curated version of (nearly) the entire internet.
Tapestry is designed by The Iconfactory, which also developed the excellent (but now-defunct) Twitter client Twitteriffic.
What is a timeline app?
Timeline apps are a new genre of app that lets you take back control from big tech’s algorithms and decide what you want to see and when you want to see it. These apps allow you to create your own personalized timelines with posts from multiple websites. You could use these apps to follow a blog you like, a YouTuber you enjoy, and even a subreddit or social media feed that you like seeing. It’s like using an RSS reader, but with support for content from many more types of sources.
Making the most of Tapestry on your iPhone
Installing Tapestry will start you off with a very useful sign-up flow. This shows you a list of various recommended feeds you can add to your timeline with just one tap, which allows you to populate the app in record time. If you’re big on customization, you can also skip the recommendations and manually add your feeds to the app by going to the Settings tab and tapping the Add Feed button. After that, you can just paste the URL of the website, YouTube channel, podcast, or Mastodon/Bluesky account you want to follow, and Tapestry will look for the feed and add it to your timeline. There’s a bit more than that going on in the back end, but Tapestry’s Feed Finder feature is pretty good at locating and loading feeds for you from a simple URL. Once your feeds are added, you’ll be able to view them all in a neat, chronological timeline.
The app’s free tier is quite generous. It allows you to add multiple feeds and follow them all on one infinite scrolling timeline. If you like a post, tap the flag icon below the post to mark it (aka bookmark it) or use the share button to send it to your friends or social media accounts.
Without a subscription, Tapestry will show you ads in your timeline. However, these are some of the least intrusive ads I’ve come across. They follow the design language of the app, and most of the ads I saw were either asking me to add a feed to Tapestry or to install another app. The app is beautifully designed and reminds me a lot about the best of Twitteriffic. A unified timeline can easily get very messy, very fast, but Tapestry handles this well by color-coding posts from various sources and prominently displaying a logo for each feed. It picked up the logos of two newsletters I loaded, too, which is a very nice touch. You can customize this experience by going to the Appearance settings page within the app, where you can change the font and the length of post previews. This lets you make your timeline look neater, and you can make it even better by tapping the three-lines icon in the bottom-left corner of the timeline. That lets you choose different sizes for each post— I find the collapsed view is best for quickly browsing, but the expanded view is better for skimming through newsletters.
Credit: Pranay Parab
Each post in your timeline is truncated by default, and even the expanded view only shows a few paragraphs at most. However, you can tap the Read More button on any post to read it in full in a new page. This view is free of ads and clutter, loads quickly, and the background retains the color scheme Tapestry assigned to it on your timeline. Tapestry also has two types of filters to help you clean up your feeds—muffles and mutes. Muffles will collapse posts containing specific keywords and are useful when you want to avoid spoilers from a new movie or TV show. Mutes will hide posts containing certain keywords entirely—great for blocking politics, sports, or other subjects from your feed, as an example.
The biggest limitation of Tapestry’s free tier is that it lets you add just the one timeline. You do have access to certain timeline filters that let you view marked posts, only posts from today, or posts from a single feed at a time. However, if you want to create more than one timeline, you’re going to have to upgrade to the paid tier, which costs $2/month or $20/year. There’s also a one-time lifetime unlock option at $80, in case you want to avoid subscriptions.
Once upgraded, you’ll no longer see ads and you can create as many timelines as you like. I’ve used this to separate social media feeds, newsletters, and other types of feeds, but the good news is that you can craft a timeline to suit your needs.
Some people would prefer to combine posts from Bluesky and Mastodon into one chronological feed, and Tapestry allows you to do that, too. One of my biggest complaints about Bluesky is that it doesn’t save your reading position, which means that it refreshes to the top of the feed whenever I open the app. I like it when apps remember where I stopped reading and then allow me to scroll to catch up on all the posts that came after the last one I read. Tapestry shows you a nice counter in the top-right corner, which says how many posts are above what you’re reading, and it remembers where I paused scrolling. This is great for timeline completionists like me, and I’ve been using Tapestry to read my Bluesky feed in chronological order, and to follow a few accounts from Bluesky.
Credit: Pranay Parab
Note that you can’t use Tapestry to post anything to social media, to like posts, repost, or interact with them directly. You can tap a button to open the post in the site it’s hosted on, and interact with it there. Still, Tapestry is great for creating a timeline and reading, watching videos, or listening to podcasts. This app lets you listen to entire podcast episodes without leaving it if you like, and it also loads YouTube videos in the company’s own player. It’s a fairly seamless experience if you want to follow a few of your favorite creators. You’re going to enjoy Tapestry the most if you’re careful about the feeds you add. If you add a high-volume news feed, it could drown out low-frequency feeds, but if you find the right balance, it could become your own cozy corner of the web.
The Iconfactory has delivered a very polished app considering it’s just version 1.0 at this point. I’m excited to see where Tapestry goes and I hope that it heads to desktop at some point, too. At the moment, there aren’t too many timeline apps that do the job that Tapestry does. The best alternative I’ve come across is Reeder, which is another beautifully designed timeline app with a similar feature set and pricing model. Ideally, you’ll try both apps and decide which one works best for you, and I suspect the decision will come down to which design language you like more. Tapestry’s bright and colorful design appeals to me, while others may prefer Reeder’s subtler tones and animations.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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