Brief You

A calm, private RSS reader for Android, with AI that runs on your phone.
A fork of Read You.

✨ On-device AI Summaries, group gists and Ask, all private	🃏 Triage Swipe through a backlog, card by card	🔊 Read aloud Like a music app, with speed and progress
🔕 Calmer feeds One digest, muted words, no duplicates	🎨 Material 3 Expressive Wavy, shaped, colourful, smooth	💾 Full backup Everything in one file

Brief You keeps everything that makes Read You great (Material You design, Reeder-style reading, FreshRSS, Miniflux, Fever, Google Reader API and more) and adds AI that runs entirely on your phone: articles and questions never leave it. It installs next to Read You (app ID com.ay.briefyou); move your feeds over with OPML.

What's different from Read You

✨ On-device AI

Feature	What it does
Summaries	Tap ✨ in an article: 3–5 key points and why it matters.
Group gists	A briefing of the newest 40 unread articles in a group, feed or everything, grouped by story.
Ask	Ask questions about an article or a gist.
Read aloud	Any summary or gist can be read aloud.
Your instructions	Edit exactly what the model is told, in Settings → AI model.

More details

• Runs Google's Gemma model through LiteRT-LM. Nothing is sent to a server, and summaries are never saved.
• Summaries open in a sheet at 70% of the screen. Each key point slides in as a card as it's written, and "Why it matters" gets its own accent card.
• Regenerate, Ask and Read are three connected buttons at the bottom of the sheet.
• Gists: tap AI gist in the floating button at the bottom of an Unread list. One tap marks all of them as read.
• Ask slides up a box for questions. Answers are short; the model may add general knowledge, and says when it does.

📖 Reading

Feature	What it does
Colours from the picture	The reading page takes its colours from the article's picture, like music apps with album art.
Floating toolbar	Star, AI, next article, read aloud and full content, in a pill that hides while you scroll.
Toolbar long presses	Star: read or unread · AI: settings · Next: previous article · Full content: open in browser.
Quick text sheet	Size, line height, margins, font and justify, changed live.
Next article card	At the end of an article, or "You're all caught up".
Reading time	4 min in the list and on the page.
Tidier articles	No share buttons, "Read more" links, "appeared first on" lines or tracking pixels.

More details

• Large header picture; feed, date and reading time as chips; title, time left and a wavy progress bar in the top bar once you scroll.
• Pictures: drag one away to close it; Save and Share in its menu; slightly dimmed in dark mode.
• Selected text and its handles use your accent colour.
• Feeds that only send a teaser show no reading-time estimate rather than a wrong one.
• Articles without a colourful picture keep your theme's colours.

🔊 Read aloud

Feature	What it does
Media controls	In the system media notification, lock screen and Quick Settings, in the page's colour.
Progress	A wavy ring on the read aloud buttons follows the words being spoken.
Speed	0.8× to 2× in steps of 0.2; the last speed is kept.
Pause and stop	Tap to pause or play; long press while paused to stop.

More details

• The notification shows the title, play/pause, Stop, speed and a progress bar you can drag.
• Long press: speech settings before reading, the speed slider while reading, stop while paused.
• Closing the article (or the AI sheet, for a summary) stops it; leaving the app keeps it going.
• Each read aloud button controls only its own reading: the article's or the summary's.

🃏 Triage

Feature	What it does
Card stack	Swipe right: read · left: save · up: open · down: skip. Undo takes back your last choice.
Auto-advance	Skips each card after a few seconds, with a wavy ring counting down.
Next group	When a group is done, carry straight on with the next one that has unread articles.
Inbox zero	A little celebration when you're all caught up.

More details

• Open it with Triage in the floating button at the bottom of an Unread list.
• Auto-advance pauses while you hold a card; long press its button to choose the delay (3–30 s, 5 by default).
• Haptics mark the swipe threshold, each choice, Undo and finishing the stack.
• Next groups follow your Feeds order. The back gesture turns Triage into a card that follows your finger and is tossed aside.
• Inbox zero also plays when you swipe up to mark everything read on the Unread list.

🔕 Calmer feeds

Feature	What it does
One digest notification	"12 new articles · From 5 feeds", once per sync, instead of one per article.
Muted keywords	Unread articles mentioning them are marked read after each sync.
Duplicate stories	When several feeds publish the same story, only the first stays unread.
Recently filtered	See what was hidden and why, and Undo it.
Sort feeds and groups	By name, unread count or the order you added them.

More details

• The digest lists one line per feed, so busy feeds never push the others out.
• A copy is a very similar title from another feed within 48 hours, so repeating headlines like weekly roundups aren't caught.
• Undone articles aren't filtered again; Reset undone articles lets the filters catch them.
• The sort is used everywhere: Triage's next group, OPML exports and the backup.
• Filters live in Settings → Filters.

🎨 Look and feel

Feature	What it does
Material 3 Expressive	Shape-morphing buttons, shaped icons, Expressive loading and pull-to-refresh, wavy progress.
Google Sans Flex	Rounded throughout, with wide headings. Reading fonts: Google Sans Flex, Literata, system, or your own.
Material You, the current way	Uses the system's own wallpaper colours; preset colours use Google's latest colour spec.
Feed colours and icons	Feed names take a colour from their icon; set an emoji or your own image as a feed's icon.
App shortcuts	Long-press the icon for Triage, AI gist, Unread or Sync now.
Reading stats	Time spent reading (a bar per day), articles read, your streak and top feeds, in Settings → Reading stats.
Swipe between Starred, Unread and All	Each with its own list and scroll position.
Predictive back	Matches Android's own back animation, in screens and dialogs.
New icon and animated splash	A fanned stack of cards that grows into the app.

More details

• Wide headings use Google Sans Flex at its widest; long names shrink or wrap to fit.
• AMOLED black still works on top of any colours.
• Custom feed icons survive syncs and are saved in OPML exports (with additional info) and the backup.
• The splash takes about 1.3 s, only on fresh launches, and is skipped when animations are off.
• A baseline profile makes the app smooth from the first run after each update.

💾 Backup and updates

Feature	What it does
Full backup and restore	One file with subscriptions, starred articles, filters, sync and app settings, AI instructions and more.
Own updates	The app checks Brief You's releases, never Read You's.
Signed releases	Every push to main is built and published as Brief You 0.16.2.N.
Reviewed Read You updates	Read You's changes arrive daily as a pull request, released only once you merge it.

More details

• Back up in Account → Advanced → Back up everything. It also includes custom feed icons, feed and group order, the Triage delay and the read-aloud speed.
• Restore adds everything back on any phone: feeds you already have are kept, feeds go into your existing groups, and starred articles come back even if their feed dropped them. Server logins and the AI model aren't included.
• Release names are Read You's version plus a rising build number, so each APK installs as an update (works with Obtainium). The notes say which Read You version a build is based on.
• APKs are for 64-bit ARM phones (arm64-v8a).
• Builds are signed with Brief You's own key when the repository has the KEYSTORE_BASE64, KEYSTORE_PASSWORD and KEY_ALIAS secrets.
• Read You updates: a daily workflow merges Read You's new commits into a read-you-sync branch and opens (or updates) a pull request called Read You update. Nothing is built or signed until you merge it. For the pull request to open by itself, allow it in Settings → Actions → General → Allow GitHub Actions to create and approve pull requests.
• To tidy up, run Actions → Clean up old releases and runs by hand. It keeps the newest 5 releases and 10 runs per workflow, and starts as a dry run that only lists what it would delete.

Setting up the AI

1. Open Settings → AI model and tap Download Gemma 4 E2B. On Hugging Face, download gemma-4-E2B-it.litertlm (about 2.6 GB).
2. Back in the app, tap Import model file and pick it. It's copied into the app; you can delete the download afterwards.
3. Tap ✨ on any article. The first answer takes a few seconds while the model loads.

How Brief You is organised

Brief You is kept apart from Read You so Read You's updates merge easily:

• Brief You's own code lives in app/src/main/java/me/ash/reader/brief/ (and its own resources, such as strings_fork.xml). Read You never touches these files, so they never conflict.
• Read You's files are changed only with small hooks, each marked Brief You, so a conflict always shows whose line is whose.
• Rewritten Read You files (the reading toolbar, top bar, filter bar, web view, read aloud…) have Brief You's own copy instead; Read You's original stays untouched. They're listed in .github/fork/copies.txt, and each Read You update pull request lists the ones Read You changed, to copy over by hand.
• .github/fork/fork_check.py checks this: every build warns about unmarked changes to Read You's files, and each update pull request includes a merge-risk report.

Building

Open the project in Android Studio and run it, or build from the command line with ./gradlew assembleGithubRelease.

Credits and license

Brief You is built on Read You by Ashinch and its contributors. All credit for the original app goes to them, and Brief You picks up its updates. If you like the app, consider supporting Read You.

Free software under the GNU GPL 3.0. Gemma is provided under Google's Gemma terms; Brief You doesn't include the model, you download it yourself.