Pulp News — AI-Powered Local News Aggregator

Pulp News is a cross-platform mobile application built with Flutter that delivers concise, localized news summaries in users' native languages. The app aggregates content from public sources, uses lightweight server-side scraping and retrieval, and leverages language models to produce clear, readable summaries optimized for mobile consumption.

This repository contains the Flutter front-end and backend glue (Firebase, Cloud Functions, and Cloud SQL) used to power realtime updates, authentication, notifications, and summarization orchestration.

Demo video (short walk-through):

Key Features

• AI-driven article summarization (LLM-backed) with configurable summary lengths
• Local language support and transliteration where applicable
• Personalized feeds and topic-based subscriptions
• Background content refresh and real-time updates via Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM)
• Offline caching with Hive for fast startup and reduced data usage
• Anonymous and social authentication via Firebase Auth

Architecture & Backend Capabilities

• Frontend: Flutter app using GetX for state management and routing, Hive for local storage, and platform channels where necessary.
• Auth: Firebase Authentication (anonymous and federated providers). Auth state is exposed through a GetxService (lib/services/auth_service.dart) for centralized access.
• Notifications: Firebase Cloud Messaging for push notifications and topic-based subscriptions.
• Scraping & Summarization: Server-side scrapers (deployed as Cloud Functions) fetch and normalize content. The summarization pipeline calls a language model via OpenRouter (or other LLM providers) to generate summaries, then stores results in Cloud SQL for downstream consumption.
• Scheduling & Orchestration: Cloud Functions / Cloud Scheduler trigger scraping and summarization jobs at configurable intervals.
• Storage: Cloud SQL for structured article & summary metadata; Hive for local, on-device caching.
• Analytics & Monitoring: Firebase Analytics + Crashlytics for crash and usage telemetry. Use GCP monitoring for backend health and Cloud Functions logs.

Local Setup (Quickstart)

1. Install Flutter SDK: https://docs.flutter.dev/get-started

2. Install dependencies:

   flutter pub get

3. Configure Firebase for local development (do not commit credentials). Instead, place google-services.json and GoogleService-Info.plist locally (ignored by git) or use environment-based injection.

4. Run the app:

   flutter run