About James McKinney

I'm James McKinney. I built Ripple by myself. The design, the Swift code, the n8n pipeline that pulls the news in every few hours, the backend, the subscription plumbing, all of it. It went on the App Store in January 2026. I also write every post on this blog.

Why I write about news sources

Because I read them all day. Ripple carries 11 feeds and I picked every one, which meant reading their ownership pages, their funding, and their corrections policies before a single story shipped. It also means I read the raw output daily. When two outlets describe the same event in ways that barely overlap, my app is the thing that breaks. I notice, and then I go look.

That is the whole credential, and it is a narrow one. I am not a journalist. I do not have a media degree. What I have is a product that fails in front of me when I get careless about where the news comes from.

What I will not claim

Ripple does not remove bias and it is not a neutral feed. It cannot be. Several of the outlets it carries have a declared point of view, and saying otherwise would be a lie you could check in about a minute. So Ripple does something smaller and checkable instead: it rewrites each story in plain language, prints the name of the reporting outlet on every one, links straight to the original, and then explains how that story could land on your job, your city, and your household.

I build other apps too, Grove Fiber and RentalFlow. Ripple is the one that has taken the most out of me.

Find me on X at @_jamesmck, at jamesmckinney.xyz, or on my App Store developer page. If something in Ripple is broken, support reaches the same person.