The Primary Feature: Doomscrolling
The dark secret of the vast majority of mobile apps we use, on iOS and Android, is that they are basically doomscrolling apps. Now that does not mean that they are serving you malicious content necessarily. But they all have the same basic UX and use the same basic implementation details. Whether the app is:
These apps all use the same basic technologies and features which are all really simple in principle.
- Fetch a list of content via JSON
- Save or cache that data in an SQLite database
- Convert that JSON into a model that is useful for the view (ViewModel)
- Display the list of ViewModels as a list in the UI (UITableView)
- Asynchronously download related assets such as images and video
It is important to point out that all of these capabilities have been built into iOS since iOS 5. This is super simple and obvious behavior that all mobile apps share.
Really Simple Syndication
You may not know this, but there is a really old technology that enables all of this functionality that is used by almost every website AND almost every podcast on the internet called RSS. RSS uses XML instead of JSON, but it enables the same basic functionality using a category of apps called RSS readers. Common examples are:
RSS-THE-PLANET
RSS-THE-PLANET is a very simple Cloudflare Worker application that can encrypt and store your credentials for your doomscrolling apps and then fetch their JSON API and convert it into normal RSS. Combine this with an RSS reader and now you can enjoy your favorite doomscrolling content on a retro device. For me, that retro device is an iPhone 5 running Reeder on iOS 6.
In fact, this improves the experience because these RSS reader apps often support offline viewing. So yeah, now I have easy access to all of my doomscrolling content even when totally offline:
RSS-THE-PLANET also includes basic features to proxy websites and images through Cloudflare to downgrade their TLS restrictions to 1.0 or none at all for older devices that do not support TLS 1.2 natively.
Caveats
RSS-THE-PLANET is not a hosted service. But the code is MIT licensed and so you can run it yourself for free in your Cloudflare account.
https://github.com/jeffreybergier/RSS-THE-PLANET
Note that this approach is inherently insecure. While your credentials are encrypted in Cloudflare, the generated RSS URLs allow unauthenticated access to your feeds. So please use with caution and keep your RSS feed links secret.