I use web feeds to discover what’s new in the world. Most websites which are worthy of your attention have their own feeds, and you can easily add them to your feed reader, which allows you to merge all of your content sources in a single timeline. By the way, that’s exactly what my Android app does.

In many cases, having a feed reader app isn’t enough though. Some people have a few devices, and they want them to be in sync. Let’s say I already read some news from an Android app, and now I want to finish reading today’s portion of news from my laptop. My Android app should let my laptop know that I already read some news, and I don’t want them to be shown again. Those kinds of problems can be solved by setting up your own server and connecting all your apps to this common source of truth.

Initially, my app supported only one kind of server: Nextcloud News. It works reasonably well, but it’s pretty slow and hard to setup. Recently, I’ve been made aware of a server called Miniflux and it turned out to be the best feed server I’ve ever seen. It’s ridiculously simple to setup and it’s also blazing fast, so I decided to support Miniflux in the next release of my app.