I’ve been using NetNewsWire for a few years now on my Mac and iOS devices. I recently upgraded to a new MacBook Pro and transferred all my data from my older machine to the new one with a Time Machine backup, with unbelievable success except, apparently, in the case of NNW.
I have always had an account that’s synced via iCloud on all my devices. After the upgrade, the feeds in that account are not refreshing based on comparing it with the contents of the same feeds on my iPhone or iPad. The only way I’ve found success with solving the problem is by deleting a feed and reinstating it from the Safari extension at the site’s web page. Since that’s a bit tedious, I was wondering if there is an easier way to restore the feeds on my new Mac.
For what it’s worth, I checked the NNW error log and did not see any listings dated since I switched to the new Mac.
That doesn’t seem to be the case. My refresh setting is every 30 minutes, and nothing has changed since I posted my message yesterday (Friday) morning (it’s now Saturday evening).
I decided to see if I could get a fresh start, so I moved the NetNewsWire folders from ~/Library/Containers to the Desktop and relaunched NetNewsWire and added an iCloud account and a moved a few feeds into it.
I am now getting entries in the Error log for today that are all (3 of them) the following content at slightly different times:
[2026-05-16 19:36:32] iCloud — Fetching zone changes: The operation couldn’t be completed. (CKErrorDomain error 4.) (CloudKitSync.CloudKitError 1) (Account/CloudKitAccountDelegate.swift:sendNewArticlesToTheCloud(::):767)
You could try deleting the iCloud account in NetNewsWire. And then re-adding it.
It might also be worth trying to sign in and out of iCloud in System Settings.
(CKErrorDomain error 4 is a network failure, the kind that’s usually fixed by waiting a little while. But maybe there’s something different about this machine? Some networking rules blocking iCloud?)
After restoring the original NetNewsWire folders to the Containers directory, I tried both your suggestions. Hopefully some of my feeds will refresh with new content by the morning and I’ll be able to tell then whether or not it worked.
So this morning I saw that nothing had synched on the Mac. All my feed counts were the same. To see if I should have received any updates, I checked my iPhone, where I saw there were several feeds missing there now. Perhaps because of synching my earlier changes on the Mac in the “fresh start” I had attempted earlier?
It looked like I might need to rebuild my whole installation at some point, so I went back to my Mac and copied the feed URL for the first of my iCloud feeds and went to the Notes app to paste it into a new note for safekeeping and discovered that I had no iCloud notes! I checked Reminders where I had no contents, but a handy dialog appeared that led me to iCloud settings in System Settings.
After getting iCloud re-established I could see that NetNewsWire was enabled and that it has 45MB+ of storage associated with it. I also double-checked back in NetNewsWire that its setting to not synch read content was still intact.
So then I went back to my iPhone and re-added some of the missing feeds which loaded immediately. I checked on my iPad and saw that the missing feeds were appearing there, and read one item that appeared in one of the feeds. I checked on the iPhone and saw that it was marked as read very quickly. So it looks like synching is working correctly on those two devices.
I have also checked that iCloud synching is working correctly with a couple of apps I’ve written. Data is being read to and from the Mac and iOS devices.
But NetNewsWire still seems to not be synching with iCloud on the Mac, a couple of hours after I re-established my iCloud settings.
A couple of steps I’ve considered:
Remove and reload NetNewsWire from the App Store.
Nuke the Mac’s NetNewsWire folder in the Containers directory again for another attempt at a fresh start.
Other than that I’m out of ideas but would love any suggestions.
P.S. I should mention that I’ve quit and restarted NetNewsWire a few times throughout this process, and in troubleshooting another problem have rebooted my Mac several times over the last couple of days.
That was a very helpful article. Thankfully my iOS devices caught up after a couple of days. I had no idea it would take so long before reading the Help article.