Lucas Albert
April 28th, 2019
Read - RSS Reader hero
Image by Lucas Albert

EDIT: May 11th, 2020
After receiving a lot of bad reviews about the last update, I can no longer find the application on the Play Store except by using the direct link at the end of the post. At the same time, the developer removed the project from his portfolio.

EDIT: March 31st, 2020
The latest update aimed to improve the overall interface of the application. However, ads has been added and it is not possible to remove them at the moment.

Developed by Matan Mashraki, Read is a small RSS and Atom feed reader, free and without ads.

RSS and Atom feeds are XML files that are often used by news sites and blogs to present the titles of the latest news that can be viewed.

Wikipedia

The application allows you to track and group these feeds in the same place so you don't have to go to different sites to see if a new article has come out.

Read wants to be user friendly so adding RSS and Atom feeds is simplified. You can add a feed without knowing the link(s) assigned to it. For example, the news site The Verge, has a list of more than 40 feeds. By using the search bar, you can choose which feed you want to subscribe to. However, if you wish to add a feed via a link, you can do it by entering it in the same search bar. For example, for The Verge's main RSS feed, the link is https://www.theverge.com/rss/index.xml. You can find a list of all the feeds on their website.

Add feed

Once you have subscribed to one or more feeds, you can follow them in several ways. The first way is to group all the articles in all the feeds, whether or not they are read. The second way groups all the unread articles in all the feeds. The last one allows you to follow a particular feed by grouping together read and unread articles.

To keep it simple yet elegant, the application features an interface designed with Material Design and three color themes. Two light themes (Light and Read) and one dark theme (Dark).

Finally, the application guarantees you a minimum of privacy, collecting only data to improve the application (crash, UI improvement, ...) and recording all your feeds on your device. By storing feed data on your device, you have a second advantage: you can read articles or summaries of them in offline mode.

As a reminder, Read is free, without any advertising and downloadable on Google Play.