One of The Best News Apps

This is my favorite news app, and I use a lot of them. It has a very nice, smooth, interface that enables you to scroll quickly to reach the articles you want and then swipe to get to the next one immediately. Its clean without a lot of extra stuff cluttering the screen. What makes this a truly fantastic app is that you can customize the content, the news sources, and also the order in which content appears on your homepage. No other app does all this. Very nice indeed!

So So Content.
While this app has numerous providers, it lacks some very significant ones such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Politico, and many others. I find myself turning to Smart News more often because the stories are more interesting.

Best Interface.
The homepage has all of the major sections with the lead stories right there. I dont have to hunt for the section I want to start with, and I dont have to depend on the app deciding for me what I want to see first. This is a great system.

Still Needs Work.
If youre on the home screen you can get to anything fairly easily, but if youre anywhere else, you have to tap the back arrow repeatedly to get back to the home screen. They also removed the home button which previously allowed you to move back to the top level immediately. Inexplicably, the settings button and the "connections" button, however, are always available. The home button is one most people probably use continually every day, but the settings button is something one uses rarely. For most people, once you have the settings the way you wish, you forget about them. The connections button is the little logo at the top right that shows you how your topic is connected to other topics. Personally, I never use it. Perhaps others do, but I cannot see how that would be more important than a home button. Im not sure what they were thinking…

The new "My News" appears to be just another variation of the digest screen which still remains. Im not sure why we need two versions of this.

The floating share icon appears when you scroll the top sharing buttons out of sight, but again its totally unnecessary as most articles have sharing buttons built into them already. In fact, rather than leaving the sharing button at the bottom out of the way, they have sharing buttons at the top and bottom. And theyre not small. They occupy about a half inch of the screen, and theres a button for Facebook, Twitter, and email, and then another button that allows you to share with any of those. That last button does everything the previous three do and then some, so again its a complete waste of screen real estate.

Really all that is needed is one share button. If the developers would understand that what people want to do is read the news first and foremost, they would eliminate all of those buttons and simply replace them with one discrete button on the top menu bar.

There are a few improvements that I would like to see: First, add a few more conservative news outlets since most of the current ones are on the liberal side. Second, Restore the Home Button! Third, delete the floating share icon. Fourth, add major media outlets if possible.

Hazeldad about News Republic-World News,Video