I thought building an Android RSS reader would be easy. I was very wrong.
A few months ago I started building my own Android RSS reader.
At first, I thought the hardest part would be the UI. A clean reading experience, source management, search... the usual things.
I was wrong.
The biggest challenge turned out to be the feeds themselves.
RSS and Atom are standards, but in the real world every publisher seems to have its own interpretation.
Some feeds use unusual date formats.
Some have missing or inconsistent metadata.
Some provide only partial content.
Some have character encoding issues.
Others contain relative image URLs, duplicate GUIDs, or simply stop working without warning.
On paper everything is "RSS".
In practice, every feed teaches you something new.
Another surprise was that building the app itself was often easier than making it reliable.
Making it work across different Android versions, screen sizes, tablets, landscape mode, and the endless number of edge cases ended up taking far more time than implementing new features.
One thing I learned from this project is that most people aren't really looking for an RSS reader.
They're looking for a way to decide for themselves what they read, without algorithms deciding for them.
That's probably the main reason I kept working on it.
Sometimes implementing a new feature took a few hours.
Finding the cause of a strange compatibility issue could take two days.
Users never notice those fixes.
And maybe that's exactly how good software should feel.
I'm still learning with every release, and I'm sure there are many more surprises ahead.
For those of you who have built RSS-related software (or worked with old internet standards in general):
What was the most unexpected problem you ran into?