Spent the last few evenings continuing work on a Flutter-based RSS feed reader. This project is now further along then my previous attempts at doing this. I’m at the point where feeds and feeds items are being fetch from Feedbin and displayed in a list view:

Auto-generated description: A smartphone screen displays a list of feeds with titles like And now it’s all this, App Defaults, and Articles on Jose M.
The beginning of the feed list
Auto-generated description: A screenshot of a social media app shows posts by Manton Reece discussing topics like media coverage, book covers, custom emojis, and Micro.blog features.
The feed item list. Title-less posts are to be fully supported, with a bulk of the summary shown in the list. Titled posts should have a smaller summary.

The aesthetics are taking a bit of a back seat in favour of functionality for now; I haven’t even changed the default accent colour. But the infrastructure is there: tapping a feed will bring up the entries for that feed. This is using named routes for navigation, and cubits for state management. It’s a bit more work upfront, but it does make for a neater codebase.

The biggest challenge so far was getting the actual reader view working. I hoping to use the webview plugin, but when I tried adding it, I ran into a bunch of Gradle errors. These were either class version errors or dependency errors, depending on what I tried to fix it (I didn’t get screenshots, sorry). I eventually stumbled upon this Flutter Gradle plugin migration guide, and following this, along with upgrading Java to OpenJDK 25, got Gradle working again.

But I was still getting build errors. The first couple were Gradle plugins com.android.application and org.jetbrains.kotlin.android that needed to be updated. Easy stuff. And then I got this error message:

Execution failed for task ':webview_flutter_android:compileDebugJavaWithJavac'.
> Could not resolve all files for configuration ':webview_flutter_android:androidJdkImage'.
   > Failed to transform core-for-system-modules.jar to match attributes {artifactType=_internal_android_jdk_image, org.gradle.libraryelements=jar, org.gradle.usage=java-runtime}.
      > Execution failed for JdkImageTransform: /Users/leonmika/Library/Android/sdk/platforms/android-34/core-for-system-modules.jar.
         > Error while executing process /Users/leonmika/Applications/Android Studio.app/Contents/jbr/Contents/Home/bin/jlink with arguments {--module-path /Users/leonmika/.gradle/caches/8.10.2/transforms/575ccd1a7426c0be21d9fe3a81898be3-05a021da-a1a7-409f-a30a-bba769b57371/transformed/output/temp/jmod --add-modules java.base --output /Users/leonmika/.gradle/caches/8.10.2/transforms/575ccd1a7426c0be21d9fe3a81898be3-05a021da-a1a7-409f-a30a-bba769b57371/transformed/output/jdkImage --disable-plugin system-modules}

Running a web search on the error revealed this Stack Overflow answer, which resolve it. There were still a few complaints about the the NDK version but after all that, the app finally launched with the web-viewer.

Auto-generated description: A smartphone screen displays a simple app interface with the title Read The Feed and placeholder text saying Content goes here.
The web-viewer, with a "hello world"-ish test HTML document

I still need to actually render the entry, plus style the HTML a bit. The immediate goal after this, once the reader view, is getting this on my phone to start playing with it. It’s just barebones for now, but I find that the sooner I can start using a project myself, the more likely I am to keep at it.