Brief You is a fork of Read You. It 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. It also fixes a few Read You bugs: read state that could go back to unread (#1254), Mark as read on scroll marking articles you never saw (#1274), pictures blocked by hotlink protection (#1347), and automatic sync that stops after the phone's clock is set ahead and back.

What's different from Read You

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• When a feed only sends a teaser, the summary, Ask and Triage's card summary fetch the full article first (and keep it, so opening the article is instant), so there's enough to summarise.
• Gists cover the newest 40 unread articles in a group, feed or everything.
• Your instructions cover article summaries, gists and Triage card summaries.
• Runs Google's Gemma model through LiteRT-LM. Nothing is sent to a server, and summaries are never saved.
• The model loads in the background a moment after you open the app, so AI answers without waiting (Google's advice for LiteRT-LM, whose loading can take up to 10 seconds):
  • it stays loaded while the app is open and unloads 3 minutes after you leave it;
  • it only loads ahead when the phone can afford it (not in battery saver, with battery to spare or charging, and enough free memory); otherwise it loads on first use;
  • if your phone's GPU can't run it (Pixels' Tensor chips can't), the app goes straight to the CPU, trying the GPU again after a month.
• 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.

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• Toolbar long presses: Star marks read or unread, AI opens its settings, Next goes to the previous article, Full content opens the browser.
• Pictures in the text get a box of their own size with the app's shape-changing loading indicator, and fade in.
• Read later: share a link to Read Later (or to Add Feed to subscribe to its feed). The page is saved with its full text as a starred article in a Saved Articles feed; a small sheet confirms it and closes by itself. If the page can't be loaded (offline, blocked, or a file like a PDF), the link is saved instead. Local accounts only.
• Newsletters read as feeds (through an email-to-feed service such as Kill the Newsletter) read like articles: the email's layout boxes, hidden preview text, tracking pixels, social links and preference footers are removed, its big text becomes headings, and sharing uses the issue's public web page instead of your private feed address.
• Tidier articles also drop "appeared first on" lines.
• 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.
• Newspaper: hold Share at the top of an article (or pick Share as newspaper in an article's long-press menu) to share it as a newspaper front page:
  • the feed's name as the masthead, the date and site on the dateline, and the headline;
  • the lead picture in black and white with a faint dot screen, like newsprint;
  • the AI's 3 points boxed as In brief, and the opening lines in two columns;
  • a zig-zag cut at the top and bottom; always drawn 1600 pixels wide, so it stays sharp in messaging apps (send it in HD on WhatsApp).
• While it's made, a sheet shows the steps (getting the full article, writing In brief, setting the page). The title and link go with the picture.
• 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.

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• 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.

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• Open it with Triage in the floating button at the bottom of an Unread list. Undo takes back your last choice.
• Summary: the card sinks a little and its border glows in Google's AI colours while the 3 key points are written. Tap the card to switch between the summary and the article's description.
• The run bar has one piece per group, sized by its cards and filled as far as you got. When a group is done you see a ring with how much of your unread is cleared ("3 of 4 groups clear"), what's left and the next group, which starts by itself after a countdown while auto-advance is on.
• All caught up only when nothing is unread anywhere, including cards you skipped or left behind, with the run's read, saved and skipped totals (skipped = swiped down; cards left behind by jumping aren't skipped).
• The groups sheet lists every group in the run: jump to any of them, or skip this one. Cards you leave stay unread.
• Top right, Auto-advance and Undo share one joined pill, like the other screens; while auto-advance runs it becomes a circle with its countdown ring.
• The shared picture is drawn just for sharing: the feed and date, the picture, title and a few lines (or the summary's points), the site and the Brief You icon, on a soft backdrop in your colours.
• The four buttons at the bottom and the Next up card squeeze when pressed and spring back.
• Auto-advance pauses while you hold a card, while a card shows its summary and while the groups sheet is open: the button turns grey and its ring stops where it was, then carries on. Long press the button (in the pill or as the circle) to choose the delay (3–30 s, 5 by default).
• Haptics mark the swipe threshold, each choice, Undo and finishing the stack.
• Undo on the first card of a group goes back into the group before it and takes back its last card.
• When a group is done, its bar shrinks into its piece of the run while the other groups' pieces fade in; starting the next group, its piece grows back into the bar.
• The long-press glow only starts once your finger has stayed still for a moment, so swiping never shows it.
• When no untouched group is left but you left cards in one (jumped away, or skipped some), the end screen offers Back to that group with how many are left; it never starts by itself.
• Big groups are loaded in full: as a group starts (and near its end) Triage adds any unread cards the stack doesn't have yet.
• 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.

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• Watched words are the opposite of muted keywords (on the Filters page). An unread article with one in its title:
  • gets a small chip with the word in lists and on its Triage card;
  • comes first in Triage and in the digest ("2 about Pixel, Gemma");
  • is counted on its feed and group at home, and is never muted.
• Tap a watched word to stop watching it. Recently watched keeps 30 days.
• The Filters page has two tabs, Muted (with Hide duplicate stories) on the left and Watched on the right, under tiles counting what was muted, merged and watched. Each tab has its words, Apply now and a recent list laid out the same way: today in full, earlier days grouped by word.
• Apply now checks the last 3 days and says what it did ("3 hidden", "2 found").
• The digest reads like "12 new articles · Variety, Kotaku, Kagi News +2".
• Duplicates: another feed, or the same feed twice. Filters lists the hidden copies under the story they repeat, and which copy was kept unread.
• Recently filtered shows today in full; earlier days are grouped by reason (Duplicate stories, then each muted keyword) with a count, and open to show 5 articles at a time.
• The digest lists one line per feed, so busy feeds never push the others out. Android shows at most 6 lines, so with more than 6 feeds it shows 5 and a line naming the rest ("+3 more: XKCD, Reddit Comics, Wikipedia").
• 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.

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• Expressive loading and pull-to-refresh. Back buttons and Triage's close button are the same tonal circle. In Feeds and Settings, the big title moves into the top bar as you scroll.
• Reading fonts: Google Sans Flex, Literata, system, or your own.
• A pale or grey feed icon gets a steady colour of its own. Icons are cached and loaded at the size they're shown; a site without an icon is searched again once a week.
• Reading stats are in Settings → Reading stats: this week Monday to Sunday (a bar per day), articles read, your streak, top feeds, and this month compared with last.
• Monthly recap: for the first week of a month it sits at the top of Reading stats:
  • the articles you read (and the change from the month before), a row of daily bars and four highlights;
  • tap it and the bars slide into a calendar (tap a day for its numbers), with every highlight: busiest day, top feed, longest streak, reading time, Triage and what the filters hid;
  • share it as a picture of the card as it is, or hide it with ✕.
• A slim version shows above your feeds on home (off with Monthly recap on home), and Past months keeps about a year of recaps.
• Year in review: for the first week of January, last year takes the monthly recap's place:
  • twelve month bars and four highlights (best month, longest streak, reading time, Triage);
  • tap it and each bar breaks into its days, which fly into twelve little calendars; tap a day for its numbers.
• It shares, hides and shows on home the same way, and stays at the top of Past months after that week.
• First run: a four-page tour (Triage, the on-device AI with a check of your phone, calmer feeds, and the buttons that do more when held) in place of Read You's welcome page; its agreement is on the last page. One Expressive shape morphs from page to page as you swipe. See it again from the tour button in Settings → Tips & support.
• One-time hints: a small bubble the first time you reach Triage, the AI button and the Unread list's Triage button; Got it and it's gone (Show hints again in Settings → Tips & support).
• Tiles and cards (Filters, Reading stats, the sort tiles and the recaps) squeeze and spring back when pressed, like Triage's buttons.
• Predictive back uses a gentler dim on the screen behind, so it never flashes dark.
• 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.

More details

• The backup also has sync settings and AI instructions.
• Every other branch is built as Brief You Nightly, with a night-sky icon, published as the one Nightly prerelease.
• 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.
• Brief You Nightly (app ID com.ay.briefyou.nightly) has its own data and its own build numbers, so test builds never use up release numbers. Each test build replaces the Nightly prerelease, and it doesn't offer Brief You's releases as updates.
• To tidy up, run Actions → Clean up old releases, tags and runs by hand. It keeps only the latest of everything: the newest release (and the Nightly), the newest run of each workflow, the kept releases' tags, and branches with work not yet in main (merged branches are deleted). It starts as a dry run that only lists what it would delete.

Setting up the AI

1. Open Settings → AI model and tap Download (or Set up AI in the first-run tour). A quick check shows whether your phone has the memory and room for it, and warns on mobile data.
2. Gemma 4 E2B (about 2.6 GB) downloads from Hugging Face in the background, with a notification; it carries on if you leave the app and picks up where it stopped if the connection drops.
3. Tap ✨ on any article. The first answer takes a few seconds while the model loads.

Already have the file? Import picks a gemma-4-E2B-it.litertlm you downloaded yourself.

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 (Brief You Nightly: ./gradlew assembleGithubNightly).

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. The README's pictures use Material Symbols (Apache 2.0) and Google Sans Flex.