Another vote for newsblur (not affiliated, just a satisfied paying customer).
Other than being a generally well-designed feed reader, my favorite feature is that you can configure it - on a feed by feed basis - to render the post website itself (which it trims down to the specific post), rather than the snippet - so with (at most) one click per subscribed feed, I read all the articles inside my feed reader, whether the RSS feed contains an entire article or just a snippet + "click here for more".
I'm a happy Newsblur subscriber. The developer has continued to extend and improve it since the days when he was suddenly mobbed by Google Reader refugees like me. It's got great uptime, I've hardly ever had an issue with it.
Newsblur did add (somewhat recently) a "tiles" like view for graphic/image blogs to the web version. Newsblur might not always be the fastest at picking up hip new features, but I find that Samuel is pretty reliable about eventually adding the "greatest hits" of what everybody else has been doing.
It's also open source for those that want to try to directly contribute code fixes/ideas, but I've rarely felt that need. I'm happy enough just paying the Premium subscription every year and knowing that suggestions on the forums (used to be UserVoice, now is Discourse) get responses pretty quick.
I'd really like a way to "shuffle" stories, such that if, say, CNN pushes out 10 stories and the Guardian pushes out 10 stories 15m later, that the order of presentation shuffles the two of them instead of just showing one source.
Also, link deduplication, because sometimes articles from the e.g. the CNN Politics RSS overlap with the CNN US RSS
What I do is a bit elaborate, and probably isn't for everyone. I run Tiny Tiny RSS on my home web server. It aggregates all of the RSS feeds that I'm interested in, then provides them as one or more RSS feeds that it generates (which I read with gReader on Android) or in a decent web interface (which I use when I'm not using a mobile device).
Feedly, it is free with small ads ( I do wish they highlight the ads in different colour though ).
I still wish there is an RSS Reader within Safari. Since all my bookmarks are synced to iCloud, there is no reason why my list of RSS feeds can't live within my iCloud as well.
Another vote for Feedly... it imported my Google Reader list ages ago and checks that box well enough for my tastes. I don't remember seeing any ads in it - maybe I'm ad-blind by now, or maybe uBlock is taking care of that for me.
bazqux.com - it tries to mimic old google reader closely, have very compact ui, support hotkeys and loads comments inline. written by 1 guy in haskell/urweb. unfortunately its not free.
Sage with Waterfox. Old, but I've never found anything better. When it stopped working in FF I had a day of mourning, and then when I found Waterfox I had a day of rejoicing.
Honestly I use a trivial client to download RSS-feeds and convert them to emails.
(I rewrote rss2email in golang.)
It means I don't need yet-another application/client and I can do sorting, tagging, etc as I would for emails. Doesn't matter which host I'm on, or where I am, the state of "new" vs "read" is maintained, for example.
I use Nextcloud’s News app. On iOS I read it directly from my instance as it is responsive. On Android I used the Nextcloud News Android app from F-Droid
Another vote for QuiteRSS here. It's the only reader I've come across that's both decently fast on a large number of feeds and lets me define complex, REGEX based filters.
Sadly less and less sites are providing rss feeds albeit it technically is really easy when having a content management system anyway. So todays we have to resort to a twitter to rss converter service and we integrate the feed into a Telegram or TG cousin via a Bot.
It is a sad state of affairs and I share the sentiment that seems to be dripping from this short post.
So much has been broken. So much has been watered down or simply blown away by flashy blinky adsy stuff. Sigh.
