# The RSS Reader of My Dreams > [!metadata]- Metadata > **Published:** [[2025-01-13|Jan 13, 2025]] > **Tags:** #🌐 #product-management #rss-reader #feature-planning ![[rss-reader-on-ipad.webp]] I consider myself a news junkie. I love consuming news articles, blog posts, opinions, debates and everything else in between. And to be able to do that, I turn to RSS Feeds. Right since the Google Reader days, I have been consuming news through RSS feeds. What I love about RSS are: 1. They are an open standard and can be easily manipulated 2. They can be consumed in any way one might please 3. They also help me navigate through content without having to worry about which device/browser I am using, how bloated the publications' website it, and whether I am connected to the Internet or not. Yes, I do need connectivity to get access to new content, but I can also choose to simply download them on my device and access them offline if I want to. Having said that, I do find quite a few challenges consuming content via RSS feeds. There are apps and services that kind of mitigate them to some level, but not much. I must have tried out scores of RSS readers in my life, and I still haven't found one that suited me perfectly. First, let's talk about the challenges I face today: 1. **Partial Feeds:** This is one the biggest problems with the way the publications publish their feeds. I understand their reasoning. They want to use their feeds as hooks to get the readers onto their websites, in search for that sweet sweet ad revenue. But the context switching from my feed reader to the browser every so often is too much for my [[Knowledge Management for the ADHD Brain|ADHD]] brain! In addition to the context switching, I could be offline at that time, or at a location with really bad connectivity. Which means 2-3 minutes gone just trying to access one article that I am not even sure I want to consume fully yet. This problem in kinda solved by a bunch of good RSS readers of today by manually scraping the URL and showing a readable view in the app itself, but that still means having to have a decent Internet connectivity at the time I am reading it. 2. **Duplicate Content & Themes:** The problem of subscribing to 20 popolar publications is that whenever a new story hits, 18 of them are writing about it. Sometimes, they'll even break down one story into 3 different ones, just so that they can get more views. That means, for one new story, I now have 54 (18x3) news items in my feed reader! I use a feed aggregator called [Inoreader](https://www.inoreader.com/) that sort of tries to dedupe articles, but they do it for the same publication, not across all feeds in my account. It's very often that I am simply scrolling through the article titles looking for something new to read. 3. **Summaries:** Usually the snippets shown by feed readers are just the first 2-3 lines of the article itself, which is never useful to gauge what the article is about, and whether it is worthwhile to dive into the whole article. Many a times, most of the article turns out to be just 300 words of fluff just to talk about 50 words' worth of information. With the latest advent of LLMs in the tech space, a lot of apps do provide the feature of summarizing the articles (for e.g. [Reader app](https://readwise.io/read) from Readwise), but I haven't yet found an implementation that worked for me. What I do today is use Perplexity's API to summarize articles via Apple Shortcuts. However, it's not as seamless and experience as I'd have liked. I wish there was an app that could show the summaries instead of first 2-3 lines' snippet in the article listing interface itself. 4. **Algorithm That Understands Me:** This is a slightly trickier problem to solve, but I think Google News does that pretty well. What I basically want if for the feed reader to gradually learn my reading preferences and automagically order the stories on the basis of what I might like to read at that time. Which means, if I opened the app after 12 hours, just surface the top news items on what happened in that time, that can skim through and get updated within 15 minutes. If I am opening the app late in the evening, surface more long form articles, or article that I have bookmarked, for me to read. It is not that hard to build, but I don't understand why no one has built something like this yet. Well, there is Feedly, but I don't find its algorithm that good, really. So, how does my ideal RSS reader look like? <iframe style="border: 1px solid rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.1);" width="800" height="450" src="https://embed.figma.com/design/uQjp8xLxxYqZrkPf0dh2eJ/RSS-Reader-App?node-id=0-1&embed-host=share" allowfullscreen></iframe> ## Always Show Full Feeds Intelligently understand which feeds provide partial articles, and always fetch the full article in the background. ## Work Offline Keep all downloaded content locally so that I can consume them without having to worry about Internet connectivity. I should always be able to choose how many articles should be kept locally, whether read/bookmarked articles need to stay locally or whether I want the images to be available locally as well. ## Summarize Use my personal LLM provider's API key to summarize articles and show them in both the listing and article views. Allow me to choose whether I want all articles to be summarized, or all articles in a specific feed to be summarized, or just provide an action button to summarize them on-demand. ## Dedupe News Stories One good implementation of this is Google News. I like how they group similar stories together. I would also like my feed reader to be able to group similar stories together so that I can consume/ignore them as a faster pace. ## Native App This is sort of a deal breaker for me. I am not a fan of web-based apps, not even PWAs. I like native apps that can take advantage of the OS' capabilities and especially provide support for Apple Shortcuts. ## Personalized Feed This is definitely the lowest priority in this list, but it is surely a great quality of life improvement for me. I want the app to be able to learn my reading preferences — both in terms of genres and actions — and adapt itself accordingly. I'd love to be able to catch up on the stories I care about the most, at the quickest way possible. Today, the RSS apps of my choice are [Reeder](https://reederapp.com/classic/) and [Lire](https://lireapp.com/), managed by [Inoreader](https://www.inoreader.com/) in the background. Here's what I like about them: 1. **[Reeder](https://reederapp.com/classic/):** I think it is the prettiest looking RSS reader out there, period. [Reader](https://readwise.io/read) could've been a close second, only if they could translate their web interface into the native app. 2. **[Lire](https://lireapp.com/):** I think, technically, it is a better app. It's reader view parsing is better, and it has a killer feature of "Calm Feeds" that automatically shows stories from feeds that don't publish that often. I find myself checking out this section too often. 3. **[Inoreader](https://www.inoreader.com/):** I've found this services to be supported by most RSS reader apps out there. Also, it has a feature that lets me ignore articles based on keywords (for e.g. deals, podcast-only posts, sponsored posts etc) and can also (kinda) dedupe a few articles. I am yet to find another service that suits my needs better than this. As I'd mentioned in the [[Now#Exploring AI-Assisted Development|Now page]], I am currently exploring this RSS Reader of my dreams. I have even created a pretty detailed [[PRD for RSS Reader|Requirement Document]] for it. I first tried building a iOS app but the no-code tools I was using ([Cursor](https://www.cursor.com/) & [Windsurf](https://codeium.com/)) crapped out pretty quickly. So, I moved on to trying to build a PWA instead. I am not there yet, but I am progressing. I'll probably share the Github link some day since I do plan to open source it once I succeed in building it.