Whisper: RSS Reader
Private news from the sites you choose. No account, no tracking, works offline.
Screenshots
Description
Curate. Read. Breathe.
Whisper is a calm, private reader for the news and blogs you choose. No account, no tracking: everything stays on your phone, and it works fully offline.
Reading
- Four layouts: Cards, Magazine, List and Mosaic, in light or dark
- A clean reader view, with the full article fetched per feed or for all of them
- Read later keeps the whole article, pictures included, for reading offline
- Several sources covering one story become one lead card
- Mark read as you scroll, with read articles dimmed or hidden
- Chronological by default; or let Whisper give more room to what you read most, and see why for any article
- On a tablet the feed spreads into columns, and an article opens beside it
Sources you control
- Add a feed by address, or paste a website and Whisper finds the feed
- Import OPML, or your browser's bookmarks, and it works out which sites publish feeds
- A feed library built into the app: 39 topics and 50 countries, browsed without telling anyone what you're looking for
- Broken feeds are flagged, with their last five fetches and the error from each
Private by design
- No trackers, no ads, no analytics
- Weather in the glance row is off by default and needs no location permission: you type a place name, and the forecast comes from Open-Meteo (open-meteo.com)
- Settings → Export diagnostics writes a report you can read before you share it. It holds counts and settings, never what you searched for or the addresses you typed
Optional extras
- Two-way sync with your own FreshRSS server: subscriptions, read state and saved articles
- Scheduled backups of your feeds and settings to a folder you choose
- If you use Lawnchair, Whisper can live on its left-most home-screen page
What’s new (1.0.5)
- Article text size: Small to Larger, in Settings under Reading.
- Keep a source out of All, so it has a tab of its own under its category.
- Show summaries and Article times (2h, 14:32 or both) in Settings.
- With read articles hidden, the last ones scroll away too, and saved ones move to Bookmarks once read.
- Fixes: a stuck "Syncing" notice, picture credits left in the text, email addresses in bylines.
Versions
Permissions
What the app asks the system for. Android only grants sensitive access after you confirm it.
- Network stateCheck whether and how the device is connected.
- Internet accessSend and receive data over the internet.
- Foreground serviceKeep running in the background, visible in the status bar.
- FOREGROUND_SERVICE_DATA_SYNC
- NotificationsShow notifications.
- Display over other appsDraw content on top of other apps.
- Read storageRead files on the device storage.
- Write storageCreate and change files on the device storage.
Show 3 more permissions
- Prevent sleepingKeep the device from going to sleep.
- Run at startupStart automatically after the device is switched on.
- whisper.DYNAMIC_RECEIVER_NOT_EXPORTED_PERMISSION
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