Slowire

A news ticker for people who are done scrolling. Everything you follow arrives as one line that scrolls by on its own: in the app, in widgets, in StandBy, full screen on your desk, on Apple Watch, and in your Mac’s menu bar. You glance at it, and it never asks you to scroll.

News sites and blogs (any RSS or Atom feed, found from a plain link), YouTube channels, podcasts, Bluesky and Mastodon accounts, US stocks (headlines, analysis, and SEC filings, but no prices), and any web page you want watched for changes. Type a name, paste a link or @handle, or start from 197 curated topic packs. Add a place for its weather, severe weather alerts, and, if you turn them on, local events and road alerts.

Each place carries its weather and severe weather alerts, from the National Weather Service in the US and Apple Weather elsewhere. Tap a place’s ticket for the week’s concerts, games, and shows within about 25 miles, from Ticketmaster. Its “events this week” line opens them by day, in the place’s own time, and lets you choose the kinds you want: music, sports, theater, comedy, family, and other. In the US, tap its car for closures and road work within about 25 miles, from the state’s transportation department in many states and from the National Park Service; tap one to see it on a map. Pull to refresh checks events and road alerts right away.

Bluesky and Mastodon publish public accounts as open feeds, so Slowire reads them directly, with no account and no fee. X charges apps for every post they read, so following X accounts would need a subscription just to cover that cost. Meta’s apps (Instagram, Facebook, and Threads) don’t offer open feeds: reading them requires Meta’s approval and your sign-in, and even then mostly reaches your own posts, not the accounts you follow. Slowire doesn’t scrape those sites, which breaks their rules. Many people and outlets also post to a website, YouTube channel, or Bluesky account you can follow instead.

New shows what arrived since you last cleared it, never more than the last six hours. Today and This Week show what was published in that window. Events shows upcoming local events, soonest first. Highlights shows the stories that stand out for their own source, compared with that source's usual likes or views, with changed web pages counted in.

Long posts and titles, and changes on watched pages, get a short headline marked with a sparkle, written on your device by Apple Intelligence where it's available. To see every story's original text instead, turn off AI Headlines in Settings on iPhone. Report a Headline, just below the switch, lists the stories with an AI headline: pick one and a reason, and it opens a pre-filled email to us in your email app.

Yes. The Home Screen widget is the line with its mode buttons, the small widget shows one story with the time and your pinned weather and is made for StandBy, and the Lock Screen widget shows the newest story at a glance. In Edit Widget, each Home Screen widget can show its own topics, places, or sources, such as Sports on one and News on the next; until you pick some, it shows everything.

Yes. On iPad, the line and your follows sit side by side, and the desk ticker fills the screen. On Apple Watch, Slowire has its own app and complications for your watch face. On Mac, it lives in the menu bar with no Dock icon or window to manage: pick one of three widths and four speeds, and turn on Launch at Login if you like. What you follow syncs between them through iCloud, and Pro bought on iPhone works on Mac too.

In the podcast app you choose in Settings. Apple Podcasts opens the exact episode, Overcast and Pocket Casts open the show, Spotify searches for the episode, and Web Browser opens the episode's own page. On Mac, episodes open in Apple Podcasts. Slowire tells you a new episode is out; your podcast app plays it.

Yes. Slowire keeps showing your last stories and weather, and refreshes by itself the moment you're back online.

No. There is no sign-up. What you follow syncs between your devices through your own iCloud account.

Yes. Slowire is free with up to 15 sources (weather places don't count), weather and severe weather alerts, local events, road alerts in many US states, every widget, topics for each Home Screen widget, the Live Ticker, topic packs, and podcasts. Slowire Pro is optional and adds unlimited sources and watched web pages: $14.99 a year with a free first week, or $39.99 once for good. Family Sharing covers your household either way. On Mac, local events and road alerts are still part of Pro for now. Nothing you already follow is ever taken away.

Slowire fetches every feed, page, and picture straight from the site that publishes it. Name lookups go to DuckDuckGo, Wikidata, and the public Bluesky and Apple Podcasts directories. Opening a podcast episode looks its show up in Apple's podcast directory, and Spotify gets a search for the episode only if you choose Spotify. Searching for a stock happens on your device, from a list of US-listed companies built into the app; following one fetches its headlines from a Google News search for the company, its analysis from Seeking Alpha, and its filings from the SEC. When you add a place, its name goes to Apple Maps to find it, and road alert maps come from Apple Maps. Weather comes from the National Weather Service inside the US (Apple Weather fills in when it's down) and from Apple Weather outside it. For the places where you turn on events or road alerts, the area (rounded to about 11 km) goes to our server, which gets the week's events from Ticketmaster and, with the place's state, nearby closures and road work from that state's transportation department. If a YouTube channel's own feed isn't answering, the channel's ID goes to our server, which gets its latest videos through YouTube's API. The short headlines it writes for long posts and titles, and for changes on watched pages, are written on your device by Apple Intelligence, and you can turn them off in Settings on iPhone and iPad. Reporting one opens a pre-filled email in your own email app, and nothing is sent unless you send it. It also checks epiqara.app for news about our own apps, which you can turn off in Settings on iPhone and iPad, and twice a day at most for an updated list of topic packs; neither check carries anything about you. There are no third-party ads, no analytics, and no tracking.