Feeder

Feeder is an open-source reader for RSS, Atom and JSON Feed. Add a feed address—or open a feed link from another app—and new entries appear in a local reading list instead of an algorithmic social timeline. The app does not require an account for ordinary use, and its project describes local, private-by-default reading as the main design.

This page covers F-Droid’s 2.25.0 build. We matched the 61.2 MB APK to F-Droid’s signed index, measured its manifest and native libraries, and checked the fixed 2.25.0 source tag. We did not install it or test feeds on a physical phone.

The six official screenshots were last refreshed in 2022, years before this release, and show the same interface in light and dark themes. Their captions mark that age; use them as a feature illustration, not as an exact picture of version 2.25.0.

Add, organise and filter feeds

You can add one feed URL at a time or import a subscription list in OPML format. Tags group feeds without changing their addresses. Unread entries are always shown; saved, recently read and read entries have separate choices. Recently read and read are enabled by default, while saved is disabled. Each feed can decide whether new items should produce a notification.

Introduced in version 2.24.0, per-feed article rules match a regular expression against fields such as title, URL, author, tag or content on the next refresh. A block match is not inserted into the database; removing the rule does not restore it. If any allow rule exists, only matching entries are downloaded. Rules do not change articles already stored, and an overly broad expression can discard wanted posts.

Version 2.25.0 adds an optional setting to justify article paragraphs against both margins. It also narrows mark as read on scroll: after an item has been visible, it is marked read only when it leaves at the top as you scroll past it, not when it leaves at the bottom because you scroll back or new items arrive above it.

Feed refresh can be manual or scheduled from every 15 minutes to once a day. Settings can restrict scheduled work to unmetered Wi-Fi or charging, and choose how many entries to retain per feed. Android’s background limits can delay a requested interval, so it should not be treated as an exact polling clock.

Reading and offline data

Feeder renders the article content supplied by a feed. When that is only an excerpt, Fetch full article asks the linked website for its HTML and tries to extract the main text. Extraction can fail on login walls, script-heavy sites, non-HTML links or unusual layouts; opening the original page remains the fallback.

Fetched entries and saved articles remain in the app’s local database. OPML export preserves subscriptions and Feeder-specific settings. Those settings can include OpenAI or translation API keys in plain text, so do not share an OPML backup after entering credentials. The separate saved-article export contains links, titles, summaries and metadata, not the full extracted articles or read state.

Offline does not mean every resource is embedded in the APK. Feed refreshes and full-article extraction contact each publisher, remote images can contact their hosts, and opening a link uses the selected browser. Translation is optional: user-configured online APIs work on supported versions, while local translation requires Android 12 or later even though Feeder itself supports Android 10. Its fallback Bergamot engine and language models are separate downloads, and the app warns that the runtime is not built or checked by F-Droid.

Optional device sync and privacy

Ordinary feed reading stays local and needs no registration. Device Sync is a separate beta feature for carrying subscriptions and read marks between devices. Version 2.25.0 uses the fixed developer-operated address feeder-sync.nononsenseapps.com; although the backend code is open source, the app has no control for choosing a self-hosted server. Sync-chain content is encrypted by the client, but encrypted data and connection metadata still reach that service. The interface calls the feature beta, recommends an OPML export first and says to treat the joining link like a password.

The APK declares internet, network-state, notification, boot, foreground-work and legacy storage permissions among its ten declarations. Our static scan found no tracker SDKs. On first start it automatically adds and refreshes the developer’s Feeder News feed. Other traffic includes feed and article hosts plus optional device sync, translation or model downloads. Optional AI article summaries use a user-configured OpenAI-compatible or Azure endpoint and key; that feature is off until configured.

About this file

• This is F-Droid’s source build of 2.25.0, signed with F-Droid’s key. The Play edition uses the different package com.nononsenseapps.feeder.play and can be installed beside it; a developer-signed GitHub APK uses this package but cannot update the F-Droid signing line in place.
• It needs Android 10 or later. The 61.2 MB APK includes native libraries for 32- and 64-bit ARM and x86, declares ten permissions and had no tracker libraries in our static scan.
• The measured SHA-256 is 6f52c11138b230d81ccaf2a73ffa1d8fcf036e6be90be8622dfa3ae2d8aee2f8, matching the signed F-Droid index.
• Feeder is GPL-3.0-only. The websites, feed entries and images it displays retain their publishers’ own terms.

CPU types in this build: arm64-v8a (64-bit ARM, almost every phone since 2017); armeabi-v7a (32-bit ARM, older and budget phones); x86 (32-bit Intel, emulators); x86_64 (64-bit Intel, emulators and Chromebooks).

Versions currently kept in the F-Droid repository. We host and check only the newest one. Full changelog.