Are there any good RSS readers for Android?

[athenian200]

I need some help keeping up with the forum on my phone. Up until very recently, I was using a Windows Phone and there were no RSS readers available for that at all. I haven't had a lot of experience with Android and kind of struggle to use it even now honestly, and especially with finding good apps to do even mildly obscure tasks. There are basically a number of ways to do things on PCs, but it seems like on phones there's maybe one good way to do things and only a few people know about it if it's even a little obscure.

So, does anyone subscribe to this forum on an Android-based RSS reader? I'm just curious, because if so I could really use a lead on that front.

[andyprough]

'Feeder' from the F-droid store. It found the forum's RSS feed as soon as I copied the forum URL into its RSS add box.

Screenshot_20230811-200735.png

I hope you know how to add the F-droid store. Google Play Store has been kind of dangerous lately, with malicious files downloaded many millions of times over the past few months.

[moonbat]

Google Play Store has been kind of dangerous lately, with malicious files downloaded many millions of times over the past few months.

Only for people who install random apps or don't pay attention when searching and then install a counterfeit with a similar name/icon. Then again, the unwashed masses have steadily dumbed down over the last decade.

[Moonchild]

Off-topic:

Only for people who install random apps or don't pay attention when searching

Just make sure you carefully check what permissions apps want that you don't already trust. The whole permissions system has been a self-fulfilling prophecy of allowing malware that need a system like that -- because responsibility got offloaded to the users and the play store and other app stores do not really vet what gets put on there any more.

[athenian200]

So, thus far the issue I'm noticing is that most RSS feed readers available don't really support push notifications the way something like, say, Facebook messenger or Outlook for Android do. It seems like what they usually provide is something where you can go in and look at things at your own pace, and that's not really what I'm looking for. The main purpose of them seems to be "decluttering" or something for people who want less notifications rather than more. I mean, I can already view the forum on my phone just fine.

To put it bluntly, most of the RSS feed readers I've looked at so far are full of ads, don't really do what I want, and cost a monthly fee or something to both get rid of the ads and get notified when things happen. And supposedly they don't do the updates "right" and drain the phone's battery a lot even if you pay. In other words, getting notified of updates when they happen seems to be a feature that they've paywalled on Android. Even though it's something that is almost taken for granted on desktop.

It's... honestly looking like I really don't have a better option than to use Epyrus as an RSS reader on my laptop. And perhaps eventually write some software to do what I want and sideload it onto my phone. It can't be that hard to write an RSS reader that just checks for updates and sends push notifications when new posts are added to threads...

[andyprough]

To put it bluntly, most of the RSS feed readers I've looked at so far are full of ads, don't really do what I want, and cost a monthly fee or something to both get rid of the ads and get notified when things happen.

'Feeder' has available notifications and no ads. F-droid is your friendly ad-free and freely licensed app store, where every app is built from source by the F-droid devs in order to avoid ads and trackers and malware and so forth. Rather unlike that other bigger app store.

[athenian200]

'Feeder' has available notifications and no ads. F-droid is your friendly ad-free and freely licensed app store, where every app is built from source by the F-droid devs in order to avoid ads and trackers and malware and so forth. Rather unlike that other bigger app store.

Ah, I got a little mixed up because I looked at the Feeder website rather than downloading it and it seemed like it cost money to get features and such, but yeah, the version on F-droid does seem nice enough (I didn't download from Google Play before since you said not to). It says it has an option to enable notifications, so I'm going to try it out and see if I can get that feature to work. But what I like about it already is that it opens forum threads in my default browser and doesn't have a ton of ads.

I have actually added the Amazon app store already, but F-Droid is a new name to me.

[athenian200]

So, the problem I'm having so far is that it seems like I have to manually open Feeder and sync feeds, and am not getting notifications. I've reduced the interval to 15 minutes to see if that helps, but it seems like Feeder isn't running in the background and generating notifications the way I want, it's doing that thing where it just kind of passively waits around for you until you open it up. I did enable the option that should give notifications, but it seems like all it does is enable a little icon showing the number of new posts next to the app's icon on the home screen.

[vannilla]

As a test I installed Feeder and in multiple places I had the opportunity to notify me, including one setting option to activate the permission dialog to let it send notifications. I'll come back with news later after giving it enough time to see if there are updates in any feed.

[vannilla]

As a test I installed Feeder and in multiple places I had the opportunity to notify me, including one setting option to activate the permission dialog to let it send notifications. I'll come back with news later after giving it enough time to see if there are updates in any feed.

I'm getting the notifications in the pulldown menu, but I did not get the sound/vibration that would normally happen along the event. I also did not get the bubble on the top of the screen. They might be a setting somewhere else, I haven't dug around too much.

[athenian200]

I'm getting the notifications in the pulldown menu, but I did not get the sound/vibration that would normally happen along the event. I also did not get the bubble on the top of the screen. They might be a setting somewhere else, I haven't dug around too much.

Yeah, I'm not even getting those notifications in the pulldown menu, but then again my pulldown menu doesn't look like yours at all. I'm wondering if maybe part of the problem is it's only sending the notifications to the default Android launcher, and my phone came with a different launcher. I'm only getting notifications from Outlook, Discord, Facebook, and SMS right now. The only option I'm getting in settings for the app itself is "Enable notification dot," which isn't really what I'm looking for.

It seems like all the RSS feed readers are designed around people who have the opposite mentality from me... people who are trying to get away from notifications and want to see less or have a more curated experience that distracts them less. My goal is to inject notifications from something I do want in my life rather than to get rid of notifications from things I don't want in my life.

Still, Feeder is a good feed reader by Android standards, it's just that my goals are not the same as the authors of these programs and therefore I can't get what I want out of them.

[vannilla]

Just to make sure: I have version 2.4.20 taken from F-Droid. It seems there is a 2.5.0 available, but it hasn't been pulled by F-Droid yet.

When I want to add a new feed, I have to insert the URL into a textbox and press a button, then I'm presented with a box showing the feed's infos. This should be a feed discovery feature, but I used only direct links so far so I don't know much.

After tapping the box I'm presented with a few settings like changing the name or adding a label. Here there should be a switch to enable notifications (it might trigger a system popup.)

The silent notifications were solved by going into the system settings in the "app" category, then selecting Feeder and finally enabling the application to be noisy.

It's more work than necessary, but I suppose the current Feeder userbase want it to be like this.

[athenian200]

The silent notifications were solved by going into the system settings in the "app" category, then selecting Feeder and finally enabling the application to be noisy.

Yeah, I'm not getting any of this on my phone. There is no system setting that lets me enable the app to make sounds, and the notifications never appear in the pulldown menu no matter what I have selected for the feed. It only ever shows the notification dot, that's all it allows.

I'm thinking that Feeder only works well with stock Android, and whatever my phone has doesn't play nice with it because it has a different launcher, etc.

Screenshot_20230812-160624.png

It just seems like it's out of my reach to make Android do what I want. I'm used to knowing what I'm doing with desktop computers, and when it comes to mobile I just can't understand what I'm looking at. I can't get at the underlying system well enough to figure anything out, and feel very much stuck at a surface level of functionality where I can't do much more than use popular apps with their default settings. I can install alternate app stores like F-Droid, sure, but that's about it. It really doesn't help that Android works nothing like Windows Phone, which had a lot in common with Windows and was kind of intuitive for me.

[vannilla]

Well unfortunately I can't help much here. It might help to know the Android version though.
The panel on the right is it from Feeder's settings or is it from somewhere else?

[athenian200]

Well unfortunately I can't help much here. It might help to know the Android version though.
The panel on the right is it from Feeder's settings or is it from somewhere else?

It's from the Settings app, not from within Feeder itself. The Android version is apparently Android 12. The model is Surface Duo, that's why it has two screens. I'm guessing other Android phones have a different settings configuration?

As for my current plans, I'm currently trying to play around with Power Automate (since my school lets me use it on that account), to get this working instead:

https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en- ... published/

I'm not sure which one I'll figure out first... a method that sends me an e-mail when an RSS feed is updated, or a way to get notified on the phone directly...

[vannilla]

Try the settings from Feeder then. Android 12 has on-demand permissions, meaning that permissions are requested to the users only when actually used.
There should be a switch somewhere that will trigger the popup to confirm the request.

[athenian200]

Try the settings from Feeder then. Android 12 has on-demand permissions, meaning that permissions are requested to the users only when actually used.
There should be a switch somewhere that will trigger the popup to confirm the request.

Screenshot_20230812-172316.png

This is what I see. The switches just aren't there, beyond the ones I've already messed with. I just can't work this app. :/

Thanks for trying to help, I really think I'm going to have to find a solution that notifies me via something else when an RSS feed is updated rather than subscribing to an RSS feed directly on my phone.

[athenian200]

So, an update... it looks like I may have found three ways to get e-mail notifications from an RSS feed without really meaning to.

One is through something called IFTTT, another involves a service called Blogtrottr... but the third is really interesting because if I'm right (though I haven't tested extensively) it doesn't require an externally-hosted service at all.

Apparently I can just use Epyrus to create a rule like this:

2023-08-12.png

2023-08-12 (1).png

And it seems like when the filter rule moves the feed items to my inbox, I can see them on any e-mail client, not just Epyrus. It doesn't even really require a forwarding rule, just having a rule in a running copy of Epyrus that moves stuff from the Feeds folder to the Inbox makes it as if I were using Epyrus to get RSS feed items even when I'm not.

It just goes to show that I am really bad at doing anything on a phone, but can do so much more when sitting in front of a computer.

[somdcomputerguy]

One is through something called IFTTT, another involves a service called Blogtrottr...

I was going to suggest those two services to you.. The thing about online services (as compared to an email client or other local program ) that I like is that I don't have to leave my computer on..

[athenian200]

I was going to suggest those two services to you.. The thing about online services (as compared to an email client or other local program ) that I like is that I don't have to leave my computer on..

Oh, they are definitely more convenient, but I do like having a local alternative to fall back on in case the online service goes behind a paywall or shuts down, I've been burned more than once by any online service of value telling me I have to pay up or get lost after letting me use it for free for years.