Over the last few months, I have been working on RSSTracker, a news tracking app powered by RSS feeds that lets you track terms while collecting zero personal data from users. In my day job, I work in Digital Equity, and I see first hand how logins and accounts are a huge barrier to entry for many people. I also see people unwittingly giving over large amounts of personal data to apps without really being aware of how that data is used.

In making a news app, I wanted to avoid those headaches and give users a simple way to get news updates.

Features

• Free and open source
• Collects no personal information
• Save terms and bookmark articles locally on your device
• Set notification frequency
• News results from over 200 RSS feeds
• Option to block results from certain sources
• Android and iOS compatible

Seeking Testers on Android

If this app sounds interesting to you, please reach out to [email protected] with the subject “RSSTracker Testing” to participate in closed testing on Android. iOS testers are also welcome.

Architecture

For RSSTracker, I opted to build a custom backend to handle aggregating and serving news instead of using an existing API. The primary driver for this was the astronomical cost of most news APIs. I gathered just over 200 free RSS feeds from various news organizations to power this API.

The backend, written in Rust, fetches new articles from the 200 feeds every 15 minutes, then indexes and stores them in a database. Once every 24 hours, articles older than 30 days are purged from the database to keep storage manageable. This results in approximately 60,000 articles being stored at any given time.

To handle searching, I employ Meilisearch , which is a search engine written in Rust.

On the frontend, the mobile app locally stores users’ saved terms, then queries the backend periodically to get new articles. The frontend checks the hash of the most recent article upon fetching to determine whether it is new.

On the Horizon

While there are numerous features I would like to implement, I’m mostly looking at a few targeted areas in the future.

• UI and layout improvements
• More RSS feeds to poll from
• Stability and bug fixes
• Accessibility

Screenshots

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• Updates
• Kotlin
• KMP
• RSS
• Android
• IOS