Minfo
Minimalistic Flutter news app — bite-sized 60-word news summaries from top sources around the world
Timeline
Dec 2021 — Jul 2023
Role
Solo
Team
Solo
Status
CompletedTechnology Stack
Key Challenges
- Condensing news into a hard 60-word limit per item while keeping the summary informative and useful
- Curating fresh, interesting news from top sources around the world as a solo developer with no editorial team
- Designing a clean minimal Flutter UI that makes scanning dozens of stories feel fast instead of overwhelming
- Keeping the app stable and the APK installable over a ~2-year maintenance window with no active contributors
Key Learnings
- A hard content constraint (60 words) is a forcing function — it kills filler and sharpens the reading experience
- Minimalism in mobile UI is less about removing elements and more about making every visible element earn its place
- Flutter + VS Code is a remarkably productive solo loop for a small cross-platform mobile app
- For a solo project, stability beats feature creep: a small, finished app is more useful than an ambitious half-built one
The Problem
I read a lot of news. Or, more accurately, I used to try to read a lot of news — until I noticed that the bottleneck wasn't finding stories, it was finding the will to get through them. Every news app I opened wanted to show me a 600-word think piece, a 12-image slideshow, and an autoplaying video before I'd even decided if I cared.
I wanted the opposite. A news app that respected my time. One where every story was a complete thought I could finish in under a minute, with no clickbait-shaped rug pulls. So I built it.
What I Built
Minfo is a minimalistic and beautiful Flutter news app for browsing the most interesting news from around the world. Each news item is 60 words or less, arranged beautifully, allowing you to read and learn at a glance. Open it, skim the day, close it. The whole point is the exit.
It's a single-developer, single-platform-target app — Flutter 2.5.3, Dart 2.14.4, written in VS Code — and ships as a downloadable APK for Android.
Features
The README is intentionally short, and so is the feature list:
- Minimalistic design — no chrome, no clutter, just the news
- Fresh news from top sources — curated from outlets around the world
- Easy to use — open, read, swipe, done
- 1-minute read per news article — enforced by the 60-word cap
- Trending news — a section for what's hot right now
- Different sections — so you can pick the lane you want to read in
Design Philosophy
The 60-word constraint is the product
Every other decision flows from this one. If a story can't be told in 60 words, it doesn't belong in Minfo. That sounds restrictive, but it's actually liberating — both as a reader and as a builder. As a reader, I never get bait-and-switched into a 10-minute read. As a builder, I never have to design a "long article" layout, because there isn't one.
It's the same logic as Twitter's old 140-character limit: constraints breed clarity.
Minimalism as a discipline
The UI is deliberately spartan. No bottom tabs fighting for attention, no badges screaming "BREAKING", no autoplay. Each story takes up the same vertical rhythm on screen, and the typography does the heavy lifting. The goal is to make scanning 20 stories feel as light as scrolling an Instagram feed — except you actually learn something.
Trending + sections, not both
Most news apps dump everything into one infinite scroll. Minfo splits the world into two views: trending (what's hot right now) and sections (pick a topic and read at your own pace). Two doors into the same content, and that's it. No third door.
Building It Yourself
The project is open source and the README ends with an invitation to fork and contribute. If you want to run it locally:
- Clone the repo and open it in VS Code (the README even ships an "Open in VS Code" badge for it).
- Install Flutter 2.5.3 and Dart 2.14.4 — the pinned versions in the badges matter because Flutter's API surface shifts between releases.
- Run
flutter pub getto pull dependencies, thenflutter runon a connected device or emulator. - Or just download the APK from the release on GitHub and sideload it — no build step required.
The codebase is small enough to read end-to-end in an afternoon, which is exactly the point. Minimalism applies to the code too.
Links
- GitHub: imsudip/minfo
- APK download: Minfo_v1.0.0.apk
Timeline
Developed as an experiment in minimal news consumption, with updates over ~2 years.
- Dec 2021 — Initial development: Flutter news app with minimalistic design, 60-word news summaries, trending news sections
- Jul 2023 — Final update: stability fixes, APK release