After Google Reader shut down, I briefly switched to feedly but found the UI basically unusable.
Newsblur is a great alternative. The web client and Android clients are both nice to use -- no experience with iOS but I'm sure it's comparable -- and are open source, written and maintained by Samuel Clay (conesus on HN).
I pay for the service but there's a free tier as well.
I think it's a bit strong saying it's "actively hostile" to power users. The developer takes a very specific view about why he has the limits set-up that way: I think a lot of people would like a different level but he makes sense over the fact that most people don't go that far back on RSS. And in fairness he's added a lot of other power user features like keyboard shortcuts.
Personally, I really like Newsblur. It's available on all the clients I care about, it's pretty fast and it's Open Source with a sane business model. I'd really like it to have search as that's the main thing that stops me finding good trends in my RSS feeds.
Is there a news reader that will preserve unread items forever? I like to collect months' worth of my favorite webcomics to read at one go, and I know the old Google Reader at least would just delete them after a while.
Newsblur's Android app can tend to get buggy - as you're scrolling through items by swiping right-to-left, sometimes it'll end up on a blank item, and the whole feed will be marked as read. It also sometimes shows some count X for a given folder, but will show less than X items.
On the upside, Samuel seems to be very quick to respond to issues, and pushes updates out pretty often, both to the app and to the site.
I've been using Digg Reader since the last time news broke about Feedly doing junk like this and I have really liked it. The only thing I dislike is that something steals focus away when navigating via j / k, so for long articles you have to click into the article pane to then use up / down arrows to scroll. It also seems to refresh feeds a little slower than feedly / google reader, but that's pretty minor.
Other than those two small issues, Digg Reader is fantastic.
I've been using Digg Reader for a few months and it works pretty nicely. I'd like it if the reloading of articles could sync in the background, and I'd like to be able to default to my list of feed articles rather than Digg's... however, it's free.. so I can't complain too much.
To Digg's favour, I do read some of their articles now (so presumably they get some ad revenue)...
I use my own install of TinyTinyRSS. The phone app is nicer than google reader ever was. That combined with having the data under my control means that it won't shut down on me again the same way that reader did.
I started with Feedly then switched to Ino. One interesting (paid) feature of Ino is essentially a "killfile" -- just like in the good old Usenet days -- for RSS feeds. E.g. say you want to read the newest Penny Arcade comic, but you don't care for the news articles also on the same feed, you can automatically mark those as read.
Newsblur is a great alternative. The web client and Android clients are both nice to use -- no experience with iOS but I'm sure it's comparable -- and are open source, written and maintained by Samuel Clay (conesus on HN).
I pay for the service but there's a free tier as well.