I’ve been using Nextcloud for a while now, and I really enjoy it. It’s an ambitious platform which can host and manage a lot of different services in a plug and play fashion. The core service of Nextcloud is file syncing. It can be used as an alternative to Dropbox or Google Drive, but it goes far beyond storing your files, and it doesn’t expose your private data to all of those shady companies that don’t deserve our trust.

It’s easy to extend Nextcloud by installing additional apps from its official app store. One of my favorite Nextcloud apps is News, and it allows me to keep an auto-updating list of RSS feeds on my Nextcloud server which I can always access from an official Android app. Having a single place to store all of my news and podcasts alongside with their state (new/seen, starred/unstarred) allows me to read my news feed from any platform. Another benefit of having a server for my RSS feeds is that the changes I make via any of my client apps get propagated to all the other apps automatically.

I tried to use the official Nextcloud News app for a few months, and it didn’t align with my usage patterns very well. I’ve been thinking about it for a few days, and I decided to solve this issue in a pretty radical way: by creating my own Nextcloud News Android app. I have no illusions about how much time it will take but reading RSS feeds is an important part of my daily routine, and I feel that it’s worth the effort. I’ll probably finish it by the next month, so I’ll write more about this project in my later posts.