I would love to see some different concepts for RSS reader UI. The left pane with a big list of feeds, and a vertical list of articles does work but I think there's room to expand there.
A more passive newspaper-grid layout would be cool. Selectively chosen headlines and images, tap to see full article. Each personal "newspaper page" is static, it won't change after it's been viewed, only new posts added to the bottom. Then you could scroll back thru pages per-day.
Looks great, and I like the simple, no-frills/IAPs model of this.
Any chance you could integrate with RSS aggregators, like FreshRSS, miniflux, ttrss or any of the other self-hosted aggregators? I use FreshRSS and I like having my feeds synced no matter what device I view it on. The Android clients for FreshRSS[0] are a little lacking IMO or a bit out of date so it'd be great to see something new.
To be honest, it's something I'm less familiar with and at the moment I've mostly given priority to something local. I'll take a closer look and see what the possibilities are.
I'd recommend you to look at Fever API since alot of different aggregators support it and its well documented. Best way to reach as many people as possible as well.
Hacking top comment: I remember FeedBurner was a wrapper around your feed that provided stats (the famous button with the counter was a lovely thing from the best times of internet). Is there something similar now?
Unfortunately there don't seem to be many planets anymore. My YOShInOn RSS reader has a Tik-Tok like interface and trains a machine learning model to learn my preferences. The typical cycle I use it on is 2 days in which it might find 6000 feed items, it shows me 300, and I might skim another 100 on special screens that score high on certain models or that fill in gaps.
It is subscribed to 110 feeds through SuperFeedr which costs about 10 cents a feed per month that's affordable at my scale. I'd like to be subscribed to 1500+ independent blogs that post once a month or once a week but I can't afford to do that with SuperFeedr so I think sometimes about retrofitting the front end but really overpolling those independent blogs 20-50x is for the birds.
People could post their items to ActivityPub but barring that I really wish there were more Planets out there because it would be simple and cost effective to subscribe to 1 Planet that itself sucks in content from 50 blogs.
Anyone could implement this. The User-Agent of the feed request should include a subscriber count for each service that is downloading your feed to provide to its users. Examples: https://www.jefftk.com/p/looking-at-rss-user-agents
+1 FreshRSS integration would be awesome, I agree that Android lacks good apps for this. I am using FreshRSS as a webapp at the moment which is okayish but a nice looking app would be much better.
I've seen this one pop up recently as alternative to FreshRSS. While not as many features as FreshRSS, I like the direction CommaFeed is going. Have you tried FreshRSS and if so, how it compares?
I've been using FreshRSS for a couple years. While it was fine, I found CommaFeed's display view mode options a lot better. It's right there under the user menu dropdown and allows for easy toggling between Compact, Detailed or Expanded view modes without going into a configuration screen or switch pages. I know all of that is possible in FreshRSS using third-party community extensions. But I just find it easy to use and closely resembles from what I remember about Google Reader. Maybe because its new and a change to what I've been using.
On iOS install ReadKit which can interact with a very nice interface to FreshRSS. I self-host FreshRSS and it works perfectly, syncing with the server so when I go to the computer, it is up-to-date with what I have opened. I do not know if ReadKit is on Android.
Polished, independent, no data collection, clean, feature rich, ostensibly ethical - lovely
I wonder where would I even start, if I wanted to bring rss into my personal Supabase instance. Chron job periodically triggering a serverless function that asks a website for the requested feed (just async fetch), then using some js rss parser library, then insert to supabase table? I really have no knowledge about rss other than as a consumer.
Thanks for the feedback. For whatever you want to do with supabase, I don't know. The application I made doesn't use instances, everything is local, even the parsing.
Is anyone out there looking for an RSS style feed of their email? In a sort of non-disruptive scrolling mechanism... possibly with AI summary of the emails. This would not replace your inbox, but allow you you to not have to go into your inbox until you want to, but to be able to stay up to date with what is going on in your email...?
The point is more generally to allow you to go longer without having to go to your inbox and/or to be able to turn of notifications for email. The RSS comes in quietly and the body and preview is an AI summarized.
Often times I'm CC'd on an email thread and can't always know what is going on just from previews, so an AI summary as the headlines would be very helpful to be able to know what is going on, without having to go into my inbox...
The RSS feed sits on the side of screen or appears on hover. It is like a summary of headlines of what is going on in your inbox. I guess it depends on your use case if you reach inbox zero daily. Unfortunately, I don't go to inbox zero these days as much as I'd like, and have so many emails I am CC'd on or back-and-forth conversations I am monitoring, this way I can know something came back and a short summary of it, without having to go into the inbox to find out what is going on (especially b/c I am not responding, as someone else on the team would be handling it).
Their "The Feed" is a feed of the newsletters which is interesting. I guess what I am thinking is more along the lines of if those were in a more condensed feed with a TL;DR type summary above it. I am also thinking of a UI that is more of a passive quiet updating feed that isn't distracting.
I like how simple the UX is, there's just a no-bells-and-whistles presentation, which is good. Thanks for not implementing accounts and data collection, as well. This is a big selling point for me on anything I use these days, although I admittedly see where account creation is useful, so I am a bit more forgiving on that.
My complaints are that it seems cumbersome to add your own sources. Darkmode also seems to be missing? These days, this should be the default mode for any reader app, let the users who want to suffer a blinding white background turn it on if they wish. The "mark all as read" button is in an awkward spot, too easy to fat-thumb when scrolling right handed. Maybe next that in a hamburger menu along with other customization options.
Great start, for sure, and so far it feels like a "cleaner" experience than other mobile RSS readers I've tried recently. I'm not necessarily interested in device syncing, but I can see where some users might want that, though that would require some kind of account or token implementation.
Thanks for the feedback. I'm glad to see that ux is appreciated. I agree that adding sources could be simplified, it's my least favorite part to implement and I notice it shows. For the Darkmode there is one, you need to press the 3 dots at the top right, select settings and then press the first parameter "Night Mode".
However, I don't think it's a good idea to make it the default, as some people find it harder to read text written in white, and there's a lot of debate on the subject on which is better.
For the button, I was inspired by other popular applications that also put a button there, if the button is too distracting, it can be hidden from the settings, it's the setting below "Night Mode" which is "Display Read-All Button" but indeed the Hamburger menu could be better exploited.
If there's synchronization, you'll need an account, but you'll still be able to access the application even if you don't have an account. Synchronization also requires servers, so it would have a cost. The application should be profitable enough, so it's hard to envisage this feature at the moment.
Adding URL is too difficult, I had to click 20x to add simple URL of RSS feed. It should be like this: click on hamburger menu, choose "add feed", paste url, done.
Thanks for the feedback. In fact I hadn't worried about that because I thought that adding sources isn't something frequent even if it's a bit long at first and I thought that adding an "add source" button in the hamburger menu would be annoying since it wouldn't be used often.
Today only I was thinking about something like this which enables reading new blogs on mobile instead of desktops with RSS feed. Will surely give it a try
Which clients still have filters? I use ReadKit but the upgraded version to modern Mac frameworks isn’t yet as good as version 2 (which is no longer signed, unfortunately).
I don’t blame the author in the slightest for the upgrade — really, a rewrite it seems — which has some enhancements over v2, but it takes a while for something like that to reach parity with the previous version.
This is a funny case where I want there to be a business modal. The app probably is great, but without some kind of financial backing part of me just expects this will atrophy, or be sold to an ad company in a couple years. I can't think of a successful open-source app that is free, given the amount of work required to sustain an app on Android.
I agree with you that finding a business model is difficult, but what motivates me at the moment to improve and maintain it is that I myself am a regular user of this application. I'm still thinking about it and that's why I'm still waiting to make the code open-source. Subscription is an idea, but I wonder what kind of features people would be willing to pay extra for? I don't want advertising, I think it degrades the application too much, or else voluntary advertising that users activate and in return receive money (like Brave does).
It sure is burdensome to maintain an app that constantly needs updating. But isn't this an appt that could be updated infrequently, once the basic functionality is in place? That could be sustained by a low-cost subscription ($10/yr?), or possibly even a one-time charge of $20 or something.
Indeed, just maintaining it isn't very complicated, but finding features for which users would be willing to pay $10/month seems complicated to me, as the play store is very competitive.
I should expand. Let's take two worlds, one where you charge nothing, and one where you do.
In the first, I get an app, but you get nothing but a pat on the back. I enjoy something, you don't, eventually you get resentful seeing thousands of people using what you built so you decide to make money off it. At this point, it doesn't really matter how you do it, either with ads, subscription, or secret dark-web stuff, you'll change the game and your users will not trust you as an author and just uninstall the app.
In the other, you charge a one-off £4.99. This is really quite small, but I now know the author gets some value from me and we've entered into a understandable contract. You are in the same place as before, but now ~$4.99 richer, which is nice. In the future, you make a bit of money and want to make more money. So you can now raise the price which will affect only future users. You can now also produce other apps, which I'll also look at those and think, well, the first app was good, I'll try those because I trust the author.
Not at the moment, but I'm hesitating. I've already started to Open sourced the suggested sources in the app : https://github.com/Martinviv/rss-sources . You can also ask me for design details if you want ...
Yes, because later on, when I have topics in languages other than English, I plan to allow users to have a language filter that will display the topics and countries that correspond to the selected language. But at the moment, as I only have topics in English and news sources by country, I've kept this structure
It looks good.. and I'm looking for a simple rss feed.
But I don't think it displays all the tags - eg I know some entries in my subs reference a file that should be downloadable.. but there's no reference or visibility of that.
This is normal, at the moment only images (jpg, gifs...) are displayed in the feed. I've yet to add the ability to read other formats, like mp3 here in future update
It's not a 100% match for the requirements but I use miniflux for that. It does have a very basic interface that I never use. But it supports a number of API protocols, so probably most of the clients that supports some backend will work with it. Also it seem to be implemented in Golang.
A more passive newspaper-grid layout would be cool. Selectively chosen headlines and images, tap to see full article. Each personal "newspaper page" is static, it won't change after it's been viewed, only new posts added to the bottom. Then you could scroll back thru pages per-day.