A lightweight, focused Android home-screen widget for RSS / Atom feeds. It shows a dense, single-line, title-only feed merged from all your sources — glanceable, resizable, and deliberately minimal. No accounts, no tracking, no in-app reader bloat.
-blue){kind=icon}
| Home-screen widget | Settings | History |
|---|---|---|
 |
 |
 |
Most RSS apps want to be a reader. This one wants to be a widget — a tiny, always-visible headline ticker on your home screen. Tap a headline to open it; everything else stays out of the way. The companion app exists only to manage feeds and browse a searchable history.
Widget
- Dense, single-line, title-only rows — merged newest-first across all feeds
- Freely resizable in both dimensions; row count fills the height (capped at 50)
- Favicons in front of each entry, based on the article's link domain (so a link aggregator shows the linked site's icon)
- Tap a row to open the article — uses Android's standard link routing, so links open in their app (Reddit, YouTube, …) if you've set that app to handle them
- Refresh button with a progress overlay
- Material You dynamic theming (light/dark, wallpaper colors on Android 12+)
Feeds
- Add by URL (or auto-prepend
https://), remove, enable/disable - Custom title per feed
- Per-feed keyword filter (allow-list): only keep entries whose title contains one of your terms
- Global mute keywords (deny-list): hide entries containing those words across all feeds
- Failed-feed indicator — flags a feed only after repeated failures, so a transient blip doesn't cry wolf
- Share-to-add: share a link from any app to Pulse to add it as a feed
History & refresh
- Deduplicated history of the last 1000 entries, with search, pull-to-refresh, and long-press-to-share
- Background refresh via WorkManager at a configurable interval (15 min – 6 h), with a Wi-Fi-only option
- Conditional requests (ETag / If-Modified-Since) to skip unchanged feeds
- Honors
Retry-Afterso rate-limited feeds (e.g. Reddit) get backed off instead of hammered - Backup / restore your whole setup to a JSON file (feeds, filters, mute list, settings) via the system file picker — no storage permission needed
Deliberately small dependency surface:
- Kotlin, single module
- Jetpack Glance for the app widget; Compose Material 3 for the settings/history screens
- WorkManager for background refresh
- OkHttp for fetching; the platform
XmlPullParserfor RSS 2.0 + Atom (no parser library) - DataStore (Preferences) for storage; favicons cached as files on disk
org.jsonfor (de)serialization — no reflection-based JSON
No Room, no Gson/Moshi, no image-loading library.
Requirements: JDK 17 and the Android SDK (API 35).
# clone, then:
./gradlew assembleRelease
# output: app/build/outputs/apk/release/Pulse-RSS-Widget-1.0-release.apkOr just open the project in Android Studio (it provisions the SDK and you can Run/Build from there).
The release build signs with a local keystore at app/pulse.keystore if present — and that file is .gitignored, so it never lands in the repo. A fresh clone without the keystore still builds; it just produces an unsigned release you sign with your own key:
keytool -genkeypair -v -keystore app/pulse.keystore -alias pulse \
-keyalg RSA -keysize 2048 -validity 10000Override the passwords without touching source via Gradle properties: -PPULSE_STORE_PASSWORD=… -PPULSE_KEY_PASSWORD=… -PPULSE_KEY_ALIAS=….
- Sideload the APK (enable "install unknown apps" for your file manager), or
adb install app-release.apk. - Long-press the home screen → Widgets → Pulse RSS Widget (or open the app and tap "Add widget to home screen").
- Open settings (the ⚙ on the widget), add feed URLs, and you're set.
app/src/main/java/com/pulse/rsswidget/
├─ data/ Models, SettingsStore (DataStore), RssParser, FaviconStore, FeedRepository
├─ work/ RefreshWorker + RefreshScheduler (WorkManager)
├─ widget/ PulseWidget (Glance), receiver, refresh action
└─ ui/ Settings / Feed editor / History (Compose), shared theme
Kept out on purpose, to stay a widget and not become a reader: notifications / unread counts, an in-app article reader, multiple categorized widgets, and accounts / cloud sync.
Released under the MIT License — do what you want with it, just keep the copyright notice. The copyright line currently reads "Pulse RSS Widget contributors"; change it to your own name if you'd prefer.