There are a few reasons for the server side component: 1. Sync between clients. This can also be done by using a Cloud service to sync some database, but resol

There are a few reasons for the server side component: 1. Sync between clients. This can also be done by using a Cloud service to sync some database, but resolving conflict data between clients can be tricky. 2. It needs a long running process to check updates for the feeds. It's hard for mobile devices to check updates all the time. So there needs to be another desktop device that check the updates regularly, and may need to sync the articles to the mobile devices. You either sync the whole database, which is a lot for some people (it has been 10GB+ for my own feeds), or you fetch the articles on demand, which makes the desktop client essentially a server. 3. The recommendation features is much easier implemented with ElasticSearch, since it summarize an article's content with a term vector, which you can use to find similar articles. And its search is much more powerful than SQLite's full text search as well. I understand some people don't want advanced features. Without those features it maybe simpler to just write a RSS client without server. But the advanced features are the motivate behind me writing RSS Brain, and how I find a RSS reader can be more useful.