Not really sure why, but the official Android application that works well with TT-RSS Reader is neither available from the Google Playstore or F-Droid. But it’s still possible to install it on your phone if you know where to find it.
Recently, two things happened, I had to change smartphone because the battery of the old one would start failing beyond usability. After 7 years of service, it’s a reasonable time to change. Second, I managed to break my personal server where I host some of my cherished online tools, among them, my RSS Reader.
Initially, with the change of phone, I discovered that the official Android app for TT-RSS − that I’ve been using for years to read my news on the go − was not available from F-Droid anymore. I remember that a shareware version was available from the Android Playstore, but that also seems to no longer exists. I tried the other apps listed as TT-RSS readers on F-Droid. But honestly, while Geekttrss seemed the better one, it still did not feel as smooth as the official app that I used before.
During my research and reading of documentation to fix the apps on my server, I realized that the official Android app was still under development by the creator of TT-RSS. At least you can see it in a high position in their code forge, meaning it received some code changes in the last few days. There is even an APK being published along with other source code releases. So I went along and installed the APK on my phone. And after some AndroidOS complains about security, the app works well and delivers the news as it used to.
Now, that’s not an ideal mechanism to install software on a smartphone. And I don’t know why the creators of TT-RSS have stopped pushing the app to distribution channels like Playstore or F-Droid. I can understand the pain or the extra work that this can generate. So, for now, I’ll include the RSS feed from the code forge release page to my RSS Reader to make sure I’m aware of updates. And If anyone has more context on why this is not present in F-Droid repositories anymore, I’m happy to work with you, to the best of my abilities, to restore the availability of this app in these channels.
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