Opinionated?

Miniflux is a minimalist software. The purpose of this application is to read feeds. Nothing else.

Focus on Simplicity ¶

Having a gazillion of features makes the software hard to maintain, hard to troubleshoot and increase the number of bugs.
This software doesn’t try to satisfy the needs of everyone.

Developing a software takes a lot of time. Don’t expect anyone to work for free.
As mentioned above, the number of features is voluntarily limited. Nobody likes bloatware.
Improving existing features is more important than adding new ones.

Go is probably the best choice for self-hosted software:

Go is a simple programming language.
Running code concurrently is part of the language.
It’s faster than a scripting language like PHP or Python.
The final application is a binary compiled statically without any dependency.
You just need to drop the executable on your server to deploy the application.
You don’t have to worry about what version of PHP/Python is installed on your machine.
Packaging the software using RPM/Debian/Docker is straightforward.
No dependency hell.

Miniflux is compatible only with PostgreSQL.

Supporting multiple databases increases the complexity of the software.
We do not have the resources to test the software with all major versions of MySQL, MariaDB, SQLite, and so on.
SQLite is excellent but there is a limited support of ALTER TABLE and the Golang driver requires CGO and GCC. Miniflux 2 was initially designed as Twelve-Factor App to run in ephemeral containers.
PostgreSQL is powerful, rock solid and battle tested.
PostgreSQL is a great independent open source software.
ORM abstracts interesting features provided by the database.
Miniflux uses hstore/jsonb/inet data types, window functions, full-text search and handles user timezones with PostgreSQL.

Miniflux uses Javascript only where it’s necessary.

Server side template rendering is very simple and fast enough for that kind of application.
Using Javascript frameworks increase complexity.
The Javascript ecosystem is moving all the time, sticking to the standard is probably more sustainable.
Having too many dependencies is painful to maintain and update on the long term.

Miniflux uses ECMAScript 6 and the Fetch API.

Using the web UI on your smartphone is not so bad:

Miniflux is a progressive web app
The layout adapts to the screen size (responsive design)
You could add the application to the home screen like any native application
You can swipe entries horizontally to change their status
The web browser is a pretty good sandbox, the application cannot access to the data stored on your phone
It’s cross platform: works on iOS and Android

The development of mobile clients is left to the open source community:

Developing a native mobile application for each platform (iOS and Android) and different devices (smartphones and tablets) takes a lot of work
The main developer of Miniflux is not a mobile application developer
You have to pay a fee to publish your app on the store even if your app doesn’t make any money