Channels on iPhone: how to organize them
News, podcasts, videos – or by topic instead? How you organize your channels depends on what a channel controls: what you mark as read in one go, what gets its own place on Mac and Apple TV, and what syncs with your other devices. The video shows you what matters in under two minutes.
In channelBar Feeds, a channel bundles feeds. Tap the title at the top: there you see every channel with its feeds underneath, each with its number of unread messages. “Home” shows all channels together, and tapping a feed shows just that feed.
The start: one channel per type
The guided setup creates one channel per type: for news, for podcasts and for videos, each one if you picked feeds of that type. That’s a good start. You can also organize by provider or topic, say everything about running, or put it all in one channel. What fits depends on what a channel controls.
What a channel controls
Inside a channel, the count at the top only covers that channel. Tap it, confirm, and channelBar marks just this channel as read; in “Home”, it’s everything. So what you clear in one go belongs in one channel.
Pair a Mac, and each channel gets its own item in the menu bar there. Apple TV turns up to four channels into one column each; if you have more, it arranges the columns by type: news, podcasts, videos and unread. You can also pick the columns yourself on Apple TV. Lots of small channels fill both up fast.
In the settings of every channel – tap the logo at the top left, then “Channels” and the channel – there’s the switch “Sync with Other Devices”. When it’s off, the channel, its feeds and its messages don’t show up on your other devices.
Managing channels and feeds
Under “Channels”, tap “Edit” to change the order. New channels go at the very bottom, with “Add Channel”.
A feed stays with its channel. You can’t move it: you remove it and add it again in the other channel. Its messages don’t come along. When you remove a feed, channelBar deletes them, including the ones in “Consume Later”, and tells you first how many there are. In the new channel, channelBar fetches whatever the feed offers right now.
That’s why you pick the channel when you add a feed, right at the top under “Channel”, as soon as you have more than one. So take a moment to think about where a feed belongs.
Retention and filters
Under “Retention”, you set how long messages stay in a channel: with “Count” and “Days since received”. Both apply per feed. Out of the box, both say “Default”: 250 messages and 90 days; you change that for everything in Configuration under “Messages & Links”. News gets old fast, seven days is plenty there; podcasts you may want to keep longer. Saved messages and podcast episodes you’ve started always stay.
Filters under “Message Filter” apply to every feed in the channel. When a new message matches, channelBar silently ignores it: it’s never stored. Whatever is already there stays.
For a single feed, you can set both in its “Feed Settings” too: its retention then replaces the channel’s, and its filters add to the channel’s. A channel of its own pays off when many feeds need the same rules: you set them once instead of feed by feed.
The rule of thumb
Start with one channel per type. Split when feeds should be treated differently: when you clear them separately, when they should get their own place on Mac and Apple TV or not sync, when many feeds need the same periods or filters – or when you simply read them differently.