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Introducing Kafka app for Internet Archive

Feb 12, 2024

Teal Flower

Kafka is an Android app that serves text and audio from the Internet Archive in a modern, easy-to-use, free app with no ads.

Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kafka.user

Github: https://github.com/vipulyaara/Kafka

Website: https://www.kafkaarchives.com/

I started building Kafka 5 years ago as a small side project, primarily to learn and try new Android frameworks and methodologies. It seemed like an obvious use case to present the vast library of content from archive.org into a user-facing app with modern features.

I completed it recently and launched it as an Android app.

It also serves its purpose as a reference application for Android development. The code is clean enough and it's feature-rich for demonstrating advanced use cases like complex architecture, modularisation, audio playback, and Modern Android Development.

Some of the features are

  • Explore and search through millions of text and audio

  • Audio player for continuous playback and PDF reader with continue-reading, zoom, etc.

  • Download (pause, resume, retry) files on your device and share them freely outside the app

  • Login to keep your Favorites, Reading List, and Downloads across app installs

Technologies:

  • Firebase for authentication and user-data management

  • Rowy CMS (cool free CMS for Firebase) for a fully configurable Homepage

  • Retrofit, Room, Dagger Hilt, ExoPlayer, Coroutines, Jetpack Compose

What's next:

Building a good product has always been the priority for Kafka. It will always be free (and ad-free) as I don't plan to monetize this. I have a mid-term plan to add some useful features.

I am planning to make it a KMM app so we can launch iOS and Desktop apps.

Getting new users is always a challenge. I ran a basic TikTok ad but it didn't prove to be very useful. I'd appreciate some tips on how to reach new users.

And of course, this was only possible because of the lovely people at www.archive.org. It's great to see that we still have people building an open Internet and serving the public domain. Please consider a donation to them if you are looking for good causes to donate to.

Please give it a try, share feedback, and consider contributing.


Download Kafka and enjoy an immersive reading/listening experience - https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.kafka.user