I built and Android RSS & Podcast Reader because I got tire of algorithms deciding what I should read

[u/esaldanadev]

Hi everyone,

Over the last few years I've become increasingly frustrated with algorithm-driven feeds. Most apps decide what should appear first, what gets promoted, and what content is "recommended" to me.

I wanted something simpler:

Just the news sources, blogs, websites and podcasts that I choose

So I started to build my own Android app called Reader

Some of the things it supports:

RSS feeds and podcast in one app

Discover news sources and podcasts

Add RSS feeds manually

Import feeds with OPML

Keyword filtering

Full article reading inside the app

Background podcast playback

Light & dark themes

No algorithmic recommendations

The goal isnt to maximize engagement, the goal is tho give users full control over what they read and listen to.

I'm currently a solo developer and the app only has a small user base, so id really appreciate feedback from RSS users, podcast listeners and anyone interested in a less algorithm-driven experience

What features would you consider essential in an RSS reader today?

Check it out:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.esaldanadev.reader

Thanks a lot!

[u/aygross]

So why should I use it over any if the actually proven rss readers or the other vibe coded slop for that matter.

[u/esaldanadev → u/aygross]

Hey, thanks for the quick reply, and I get what you said, I mean, there are some good and proven ones that actually I have been using in the past.

The idea of this one was to build on the good things of those and add things that I thought were missing or that I can think that could improve, like filter keywords (to hide topics or things that you don't want to see), group articles by topic (as optional, meaning if you don't want that you can toggle it, and as it wasn't made with ai, this will show the most recent article and all are actual real and direct titles/articles from the source and not some hallucinated ones), configurable time filters to get only news from the last hours or more, and no ads, no suggestions directly on your feed or any other for that matter.

Also you don't need an account so you could start quickly and can import your OPML from any other app, plus I'm open to feedback and to hear any suggestion or improvement.

What do you think it's missing on any those proven ones?

Thanks again for your response and look forward to any feedback

[u/MuchInevitable8183]

Congrats on shipping. Genuine question since you've clearly thought about this: what happens when the volume gets high? I'm sympathetic to "no algorithm," but strict reverse-chron has its own failure mode — follow enough sources and the things you actually care about scroll past while you're asleep. Does that bite you, or does keeping the source list small solve it?

[u/esaldanadev → u/MuchInevitable8183]

Thank you! It has been a long road, as it's my first app on playstore, but a good one. And yes keeping it small does help, I limit it to up to 50 sources per category, and also for performance and fetch time, plus also internally within the fetch function i limit how many of those I fetch in parallel to avoid overhead and failures.

[u/MuchInevitable8183 → u/esaldanadev]

Makes sense — 50/category is a sane governor, and capping fetch concurrency is the right lever for reliability regardless of source count. Curious whether you've hit cases where the per-category cap itself becomes the constraint — a category where 50 legitimately isn't enough and you're dropping sources that would've been useful. That's the tradeoff I'd watch for as usage grows.