I love the swipe left on my phone's home screen. Coffee in one hand, thumb swipes left, and I see what is going on in the world. It is one of the few phone habits I actually like.

What I don't like is what I see there. So I built my own feed, called it Samizdat, and put it exactly where Google Discover used to be.

In this post, I'll walk you through:

why Google Discover and Samsung News drove me crazy

the small hack to get my own widget on the left page of a Samsung phone

the Cloudflare setup behind it, and the one query that blew my free plan

The problem

I have a Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra. On One UI the page left of your home screen can show exactly three things: Google Discover, Samsung Free (now Samsung News), or nothing. That's it.

I tried both. Both are bad in the same ways:

Paywalls everywhere. Every third story is a site I don't pay for. I tap, I get a "subscribe to continue" box. Why show it to me then?

Junk. Celebrity gossip, sports I don't follow, "you won't believe what this actor did".…