# Read You: a Material You RSS reader for Android > Read You is a Kotlin and Jetpack Compose Android RSS reader styled after Material You. It handles OPML import and export, full-article parsing and third-party sync accounts, but it is phone-only and its integration list is still short. **ReadYouApp/ReadYou** — An Android RSS reader presented in Material You style. - Repository: https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou - Stars: 7,557 · Forks: 336 - Language: Kotlin - License: GPL-3.0 - Published: 2026-09-22 · Updated: 2026-09-22 · Language: en - Canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/readyouapp-readyou ## What Read You solves, and who it is actually for An RSS reader on Android has to answer one question before anything else: does it hold your subscriptions on the device, or does it talk to a server? Read You answers both. The README lists subscribe to RSS links, import or export OPML files, notification of new articles, article readability optimization, full content parse for original articles, multi-account and read aloud as completed features. That is a local reader with an account layer bolted on, not a thin client for someone else's service. The audience follows from that. If you keep a long OPML file and want it on a phone without signing up for anything, Read You is aimed at you. If you already run FreshRSS or a Fever-compatible service and want the phone to be a window onto it, the integration list covers those two and nothing else. The README marks Miniflux, Tiny Tiny RSS, Inoreader, Feedly and Feedbin as unchecked, so anyone whose feeds live in one of those services has no supported path today. Multi-account support is worth noting because it changes the shape of the app. You can hold more than one source at once, which means the local feed list and a server-backed account can coexist rather than forcing a migration. ## How Read You is put together: Compose, Rome and Readability4J The README states that Read You is based on the Jetpack Compose toolkit for building Android's native UI. The repository layout backs that up: the code is Kotlin, the build is Gradle with build.gradle.kts and settings.gradle.kts at the top level, and the application module sits in app/. There is no server component in the tree, so any sync that happens is the app talking outward to a service you already have. The credits section names the libraries doing the parsing work. Rome handles feed parsing, Readability4J handles article extraction, opml-parser handles the OPML format, and ParseRSS and compose-html appear alongside them. That split matters when a feed renders badly: the failure is usually in extraction, not in the feed parser, and the two are separate dependencies with separate behaviour. The data flow the documentation implies is short. A feed is fetched, Rome turns the XML into items, Readability4J attempts to pull the full article body from the linked page when full content parse is on, compose-html renders that HTML inside the Compose UI, and the result is stored locally unless a Fever or Google Reader account is configured. The README does not document a sync conflict policy for the multi-account case, and it does not say what happens when the same feed URL exists under two accounts. ## Installing Read You from F-Droid or a GitHub release The README points at three distribution channels: GitHub releases, a Telegram channel, and F-Droid, where the package is published as me.ash.reader. There is no Play Store link in the README. F-Droid is the simplest route if you want the store to handle updates: ```bash # F-Droid package name me.ash.reader ``` If you would rather take the release APK directly, the releases page is the source, and the latest release listed in the repository is 0.16.2 from 2026-06-03. ```bash # Download the APK from the releases page # https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou/releases ``` One constraint is stated plainly in the README and it is easy to miss: F-Droid releases cannot upgrade to other releases, because F-Droid compiles, signs and distributes them uniformly. Pick a channel and stay on it. Switching later means uninstalling and reinstalling, and the README does not document a migration path between the two. If you want the newest code, the README describes Nightly builds as artifacts on the GitHub Actions workflow page, downloadable from the workflow's summary page, possibly requiring a GitHub login. It also warns that Nightly builds may have bugs, are not recommended for everyday use, and that you should back up your data first. That warning is the only backup guidance in the README, which is a gap: there is no documented scheduled export. Building from source is a three-step process in the README. Clone the repository, open it in the latest Android Studio, and press Run, with a note that you should select a Release build if the debug build lags. ```bash git clone https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou.git ``` ## First real use: OPML in, feeds read The first thing most people do with a new reader is move their subscriptions across. The README lists import or export OPML files as a completed feature, so the intended path is to export from whatever you use now and import that file into Read You. The README does not document the exact menu location for the import action, so expect to find it in the app's settings or feed management area rather than following a documented route. After import, the account question comes up. If you want everything to stay on the phone, do nothing: the local feed list is the default state. If you want a server to hold the subscriptions, the README lists Fever and Google Reader as the supported integration APIs, which in practice means pointing Read You at a FreshRSS instance, since FreshRSS is listed as supported and speaks both. Notifications are the third piece. Notification of new articles is a completed feature, so background refresh drives Android notifications. The README does not state the refresh interval or whether it is user-configurable, and it does not describe battery behaviour, so anyone who cares about either should check the app's settings screen after installing rather than expecting documentation. Read aloud is also listed as complete. The README does not say which text-to-speech engine it uses, so the output depends on what is installed on the device. ## What is missing: no widget, a short integration list, and a one-way door on F-Droid The most concrete limitation is in the feature list itself. Android widget is unchecked. On Android, a home screen widget is how a lot of people actually consume a feed reader, and Read You does not have one. The README ends that list with an ellipsis rather than a roadmap, so there is no committed date for it. The integration list is the second constraint. Fever and Google Reader are checked. Miniflux, Tiny Tiny RSS, Inoreader, Feedly and Feedbin are not. If your reading life is organised around one of the unchecked services, Read You cannot reach it, and no amount of local configuration changes that. The README presents this as progress rather than as a promise, which is honest but also means you should not adopt Read You on the assumption that Miniflux support is imminent. The distribution split is the third. F-Droid builds are compiled, signed and distributed by F-Droid, and the README states they cannot upgrade to other releases. That is a real constraint if you later decide you want the GitHub APK, and it is the kind of thing people discover after they have already imported hundreds of feeds. Finally, the README's only data-safety instruction appears in the Nightly section, and it is a warning rather than a feature: back up before trying Nightly. There is no described automatic backup, and the README does not document rollback from a Nightly build to a release. ## Read You against Feedly, FocusReader and Readrops The alternatives people search for alongside Read You are Feedly, FocusReader and Readrops, and the difference is mostly about where the data lives. Feedly is a hosted service with its own account and its own apps. Read You is an Android client that stores feeds locally or connects to a server you control. That is the whole argument: with Feedly you are renting the reading state, and with Read You plus FreshRSS you are running it. The cost is that you have to run something. FocusReader and Readrops are other Android readers. The README does not compare Read You to either, so the only honest difference visible here is design and integration coverage: Read You is built on Jetpack Compose and presented in Material You style, and its supported sync backends are Fever and Google Reader, which is a narrow set compared with readers that speak Miniflux or Feedbin. If your server is Miniflux, Read You is the wrong tool and one of those others may not be. Against a desktop reader, the comparison is simpler. Read You is Android only. The repository contains no desktop target, and the README makes no claim about one. ## Licence, maintenance and what upgrades cost you Read You is licensed under GPL-3.0, and the LICENSE file sits at the top level of the repository. For someone installing the app, the licence changes nothing about daily use. For someone forking it or shipping a modified build, GPL-3.0 carries obligations around source distribution that are worth reading in full rather than summarising here; this is not legal advice and the licence text is the authority. The repository is not archived, and the last push was on 2026-08-11, which is recent enough that the project is not dormant. Releases are spaced out rather than constant: 0.16.0 on 2026-01-25, 0.16.1 on 2026-02-01, and 0.16.2 on 2026-06-03. That cadence suggests patch releases between larger ones, so an upgrade is usually a small jump rather than a migration. Upgrade cost depends on your channel. On F-Droid, updates arrive through the store and stay within F-Droid's signing. On GitHub releases, you install APKs yourself. The README does not describe an in-app updater, and it does not document a database migration process between versions, so the practical advice is the same one the README gives for Nightly: keep an OPML export somewhere before you move versions. That export is a listed feature, so it is a supported action rather than a workaround. ## Conclusion Read You fits Android users who want a local-first RSS reader with OPML import and export, and who are willing to run a FreshRSS or Fever account if they want sync. It is the wrong choice for anyone who needs a desktop client, an iOS build, a home screen widget, or sync against Miniflux, Tiny Tiny RSS, Inoreader, Feedly or Feedbin, all of which the README lists as unchecked. Before adopting it, verify two things: whether you want the F-Droid build or the GitHub release, because the README states F-Droid releases cannot upgrade to other releases, and whether the app's full content parse produces acceptable output on the feeds you actually read, since that behaviour is not configurable in the documentation. ## FAQ ### What is the best free RSS reader app? There is no single answer, but Read You is a free open source Android option: the README describes it as free software whose full functionality every user can enjoy for free, licensed GPL-3.0. It supports RSS subscriptions, OPML import and export, notifications and full content parse. ### Do people still use RSS readers? The README does not contain usage statistics, so it cannot answer this. What it does show is a project still receiving commits: the repository is not archived and the last push was on 2026-08-11. ### What do people use RSS for? The README does not describe RSS use cases in general. In Read You's terms, RSS is what you subscribe to: the README lists subscribing to RSS links and importing or exporting OPML files as completed features. ### Can you use RSS for free? The README does not discuss RSS itself in those terms. For Read You, it states the app is free open source software and that every user can enjoy its full functionality for free, with an optional sponsorship link. ## Sources - [Issues](https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou/issues) - [License: GPL-3.0](https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou/blob/main/LICENSE) - [README](https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou/blob/main/README.md) - [ReadYouApp/ReadYou on GitHub](https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou) - [Releases](https://github.com/ReadYouApp/ReadYou/releases) --- Hysen Labs editorial analysis, written from the project's own repository and release notes. Cite the canonical page: https://hysenlabs.com/projects/readyouapp-readyou