Brooklet is an opinionated app for reading RSS and Atom feeds using the Miniflux server. It works with Android and it syncs and stores your articles offline if you're not always connected to your server. There's also an extra integration into Karakeep for bookmarking.

Brooklet is primarily maintained for its author's own use. It is free software: fork it, adapt it, and maintain your own version if it is useful to you. There is no promise of user support, compatibility, feature work, or response times. Please read SECURITY.md before reporting a vulnerability, and CONTRIBUTING.md before opening a non-security issue or pull request.

Brooklet is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later; see COPYING. The privacy policy is in PRIVACY.md, and the release checklist for the Google Play Data Safety form is in docs/PLAY_DATA_SAFETY.md. See PERFORMANCE_TESTING.md for the local optimized release deployment path. This is not currently released on the play store and may not be.

Brooklet requires HTTPS for configured Miniflux and Karakeep services. Their credentials are encrypted by Android Keystore; cached article text and metadata remain in the app's local database for offline use. Credential-bearing API requests do not follow redirects. Article images are transient, HTTPS-only, redirect-free, and cannot resolve to local/private network addresses.

See PRIVACY.md for the full data-handling description. This model does not protect data from someone who can unlock or compromise the device, or from a Miniflux/Karakeep server or article site chosen by the user.

The phone/tablet app supports headline selection with Up/Down or J/K, Enter to open, R for read/unread, and U for Undo. Mouse clicks select, double-click opens, and right-click shows article actions. Touch tap/swipe behavior is retained. Press F1 or use the workspace menu for shortcut help; see the complete keyboard and mouse guide.

You can build the app using Android Studio or any other Android dev tools. The phone application is the app-phone Gradle module and the independently packaged Wear OS application is app-wear.

JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk-17 \
GRADLE_USER_HOME="$PWD/.gradle-local" \
./gradlew :core-model:test :app-phone:assembleDebug :app-wear:assembleDebug

Set JAVA_HOME to a local JDK 17 installation; the path above is only an example. Never commit local.properties, signing keys, emulator captures, logs, or generated build/ output. These are ignored by the repository and may contain machine-specific paths or private test data.

Both applications compile and target API 37.1. The phone minimum is API 28; the watch minimum is API 33 (Wear OS 4). Article images remain network-only on the phone and are omitted entirely from the watch reader.

app-wear is a compact offline reader designed around the 41 mm Pixel Watch 2 profile. In release builds, initial setup starts automatically on the watch and is confirmed from the Set up a watch section in phone Settings. After that one-time credential transfer, the watch syncs directly with the configured Miniflux HTTPS server; the phone does not relay article caches or reading actions.

When both brooklet.devMinifluxUrl and brooklet.devMinifluxToken are present in the ignored local.properties, the debug Wear build embeds those same local development values and provisions itself directly. No phone interaction is required for that debug-only path. Release builds always receive empty development fields and never package these credentials.

The watch keeps at most 100 ordinary unread entries, 10 recently opened read entries for 24 hours, and 25 MiB of normalized text bodies. Images are omitted, useful alt text is retained, and individual bodies are capped at 256 KiB on a block boundary. Pending read, star, and Miniflux-Karakeep actions are protected from cache eviction. Search, notifications, complications, feed administration, and direct Karakeep credentials are intentionally not part of the first Wear release.

For local performance testing, an optimized release APK can be signed with the debug certificate by adding this ignored setting to local.properties:

brooklet.debugSignRelease=true

Build the matching pair with ./gradlew :app-phone:assembleRelease :app-wear:assembleRelease. These artifacts are for local testing only and must not be uploaded to Play.

To run all the development checks Use JDK 17 and a repository-local Gradle cache:

JAVA_HOME=/path/to/jdk-17 \
GRADLE_USER_HOME="$PWD/.gradle-local" \
./gradlew :core-model:test :core-network:test :core-sync:test \
  :app-phone:testDebugUnitTest :app-wear:testDebugUnitTest lintDebug \
  :app-phone:assembleDebug :app-wear:assembleDebug

For the release rehearsal, follow docs/release.md. Do not commit generated artifacts, local configuration, signing keys, captures, or logs.

The Android checks workflow builds every pull request and every commit pushed to main. After all checks pass, its run summary contains a 14-day brooklet-debug-<commit> artifact with an installable, debug-signed APK. The workflow can also be run manually for any branch from GitHub's Actions tab. GitHub does not run workflows for arbitrary commits that have not been pushed.

Treat CI APKs as short-lived test builds: they use the debug application ID and debug signing certificate, are not optimized release binaries, and must not be published to an app store. A contributor from a fork cannot obtain repository secrets through this pull-request workflow.