Aggregator News is an RSS Feed Reader to read news for free, quickly, without ads. The application allows you to quickly aggregate information from various sources, enabling you to have all the news grouped and organized in one place. Unlike social networks, where article priority is determined by algorithms, in this app, news remains in chronological order.
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Goals:
- Quickly stay informed, saving time by avoiding checking dozens of websites.
- Enjoy a distraction-free and ad-free interface.
- Receive personalized news based on your interests.
- Free: The application is completely free, without ads and registration.
- Configuration: In the initial setup and settings, customize language and followed topics: sports, motors, travel, music, etc.
- Sources: You can add other sites by searching for the address or checking popular/recommended ones.
- Compatibility: You can follow all sites that support RSS/ATOM. If a site doesn’t support it, you can use its Google News address.
- Layout: By default, news is displayed in a scrollable list. Alternatively, you can view one article per page with an image, title, and description.
- Privacy: The app is private, saving preferences locally, requiring no email or account. No data is stored elsewhere.
- Categories: You can categorize followed sites into different tabs on the main screen.
- Lists: Through “read later” and “favorites,” you can save articles for later viewing.
- Sharing: Through “copy link” and “share,” you can send news to other apps and people.
- Offline: Without internet, you can continue to view previously downloaded content.
- Customization: In settings, customize colors, language, news limit, dark mode, images, and more.
- Filters: Exclude news containing specific words through settings and parental control.
- Under the Hood: News is retrieved from the internet via HTTP requests from RSS feeds, similar to Google News. Essential information (title, date, time) is extracted from XML and saved locally in an SQLite database. Images and descriptions are retrieved from site metadata, similar to WhatsApp.
- Technologies: Language: Dart, Framework: Flutter, Design: Material Design 3.
- Optimization: The application is built to use minimal internet, loading thousands of news in a few MB by reading only textual data. To minimize network requests, the cache is used and automatically emptied after a few hours. Old articles are automatically deleted.
- Performance: Loads hundreds of sites in a few seconds. Network requests are made in parallel, any offline sites are ignored, and there’s a maximum connection time for slow ones.
- Battery: Thanks to the absence of background processes, syncs, and notifications, the app doesn’t consume battery once closed by the user.
- Migrations: Through OPML import/export, you can transfer feeds to other devices or migrate from other RSS readers.
- Alternatives: An alternative to FEEDLY, FLIPBOARD, GOOGLE NEWS, AGGREGATOR NEXT, GREADER, FEEDER, INOREADER, MICROSOFT START, SAMSUNG NEWS, OPERA NEWS, SCOOPER NEWS, AP MOBILE, INSHORTS, BUNDLE BREAKING NEWS, NEWS POINT, NEWS SUITE SONY, PLENARIA, SQUID, FLYM NEWS READER, UPDAY, PLUMA RSS READER, PALABRE, FEEDME, NEWSBLUR, FOXUS READER, LOCAL NEWS, JUST RSS, NEXTCLOUD NEWS, READEROO, TECH NEWS, LASER NEWS, NOTIZIE LOCALI, NEWS RADAR, NEWS AGGREGATOR RSS, LATEST NEWS.
- Contact: aggregator-news[@]proton[.]me.
Audio Demonstration
View on Google Play StoreFree or paid:
- Free
Accessibility and User Comments:
The good thing about “Aggregator News RSS Reader” has to do with the fact that it doesn’t have any ads, doesn’t require an account, doesn’t have a subscription nor does it collect any data. Just install, launch and use!
By default, opening an article displays its link along with options, including one to read it on its website. However, the app's native reader can be used after enabling it in settings. To do this, open the menu, go to settings, select the News tab at the bottom, and choose Read Mode for Open News Mode. The reader appears to be accessible, allowing the article's content to be navigated with a screen reader. However, it omits some formatting, such as headings, so the screen reader's heading navigation cannot be used. Additionally, links within articles are presented as buttons for the screen reader, each in a separate focus. Double-tapping them reveals the actual links, along with options to open them in a browser or copy them.
ACCESSIBILITY
The app is basically accessible with three unlabeled buttons that are found near the top of the screen. They are identified with the help of TalkBack's automatic icon description. Those buttons are in this order from the mid-section of the phone at the very top from the left to the top-right corner:
- “Search”
- “Refresh”
- “Show menu”
Unfortunately, there is no way to manually label those buttons.
It's worth noting here that the Jieshuo screen reader can detect those button labels without the need to activate any additional option.
At the bottom are 4 tabs:
- “Sites followed”
- “Categories”
- “Favorites”
- “Read Later” (to the right edge)
Note that in the main UI where the articles are displayed, scrolling the screen towards the bottom auto-hides those tabs above. Scrolling back towards the top makes them reappear. Tapping on the “Show menu” on the top-right corner and then tapping on the “Settings button” takes you to the “Preferences”, and in here, you can choose whether those tabs should be hidden or not when you are scrolling down the screen with articles.
Another accessibility issue worth noting is that the screen reader doesn't announce when an item is selected in some app screens. This is true when selecting the language and when selecting the favorite categories. Double-tapping an item selects it, though.
Last Tested App version and Android version:
App version: 1.4.0, Android 14
Hey there! You can now enable read-mode in settings 😉 and read all the article inside the app 😀
Please change this
“THE NOT SO GOOD
There’s a glaring omission with the app and this omission has to do with the fact that it doesn’t have a natively built-in reader, thus, in order to read an article, you’d tap on a button that opens up the app from the site it fetched it from.”
Thank you for pointing out the availability of the internal reader. The notes have been edited to include this information.
Example here:
https://xdaforums.com/t/app-aggregator-news-rss-feed-reader-free-no-ads-2024.4652685/post-89368274