Flashbit

An iOS news reader app with Instagram Stories-style swipeable news cards from RSS feeds.

Features

• Swipeable feed with tap navigation (left = previous, right = next)
• Double-tap to save articles for later
• Article caching with delta fetching (200 default, 500 max)
• Seen tracking - only shows unseen articles on next session
• Interactive onboarding tutorial for first-time users
• In-app Safari browser for full articles (tap headline to open)
• Filter & sort saved articles by category and date
• Background refresh to keep articles up to date
• Dark mode interface

RSS Sources

• BBC News
• The Guardian
• Reuters
• TechCrunch

Architecture

Flashbit follows the MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern with a clean feature-based folder structure:

Flashbit/
├── App/                    # App entry point & lifecycle
├── Core/
│   ├── Constants/          # Centralized app constants
│   ├── Extensions/         # Date and String extensions
│   └── Protocols/          # Service protocol definitions
├── Models/                 # Data models (Bit, BitCategory, Tab)
├── Services/               # Network & persistence services
├── ViewModels/             # State management per feature
├── Views/
│   ├── Components/         # Reusable UI components
│   ├── Feed/               # Main feed views
│   ├── Saved/              # Saved articles views
│   └── Settings/           # Settings views
└── Assets.xcassets/        # App icons & colors

Requirements

• iOS 17.0+
• Xcode 15.0+
• Swift 5

Getting Started

1. Clone the repository
2. Open Flashbit.xcodeproj in Xcode
3. Select a simulator or device
4. Build and run (Cmd+R)

No third-party dependencies required.

Tech Stack

• SwiftUI - Declarative UI framework
• Swift Concurrency - async/await, actors
• XMLParser - RSS feed parsing
• UserDefaults - Local persistence
• BackgroundTasks - Background article refresh
• SafariServices - In-app article viewing