In 2013, as Google discontinued Google Reader, EasyRSS stopped working. It was a rather unfortunate event. I was one of the users who heavily impacted by its discontinuation together with millions of users around the world. At the time I had the opportunity to switch EasyRSS to other RSS aggregators, such as Feedly, however, I didn’t get time to do it. Instead, I started using other news apps, such as Flipboard.
I open-sourced EasyRSS on Github in 2012, following my earlier promise. It was one of the most interesting college projects I worked on. I still remember I spent tens of hours optimizing the app’s performance to make it run smoothly on my old Android phone, a Sony Xperia running Android 2.3. There were some remarkable events, such as switching JSON parsing to use Jackson instead of the system-provided JSON library, leading to a substantial speed up. HTML parsing was customized as well to ensure the cleanness of the content. An early version of web page parser was built to extract the article from a web page, greatly shortening the content’s loading time. The app’s design got refreshed a few times. I was not a designer. However, after a few rounds of iterations, the app reached a point where the UI is quite mature, even in today’s eyes as I checked the screenshots just now. The app’s logo was created by myself, fitting into the app’s color scheme. I still like it very much.
Those are all fun activities, reminding me what the experience is to make an app single-handedly, and how limited the hardware is on older Android phones. Long gone the old days!
Though EasyRSS has stopped working for quite a while, I kept EasyRSS’s website alive, since it has been part of my personal website. It had been running quietly for more than 10 years. Days ago, as I decided to rebuild my personal website, EasyRSS’s website was finally shutdown. In the future, EasyRSS’s site traffic will be redirected to this post.
So, after so many interesting events, this marks the end of EasyRSS. What a fun journey!