News in the digital age has gotten faster, so it's no surprise that more and more users are getting their news on their phones rather than on their TVs. And while news aggregators like Press and Newsstand have their place, today we're going to look at getting our news straight from the source. These are the best apps from professional news organizations, at least from the humble opinions of the Android Central staff.
These apps can give you almost anything in terms of news and you will feel the world events in the palm of your hand. With features like news recommendation personalized to you and sharing news to your favorite social network are few elements you can enjoy.
The BBC is one of the most used news apps in the world, and that may be because BBC is a worldwide name in news but also because they've got a bang-up little app with a few bells and whistles. The homepage is a like a giant tower of spinning articles: each section gets a row and then you pull it around looking for one that interests you. You can customize the sound for push notifications and you can set whether or not the app can update in the background and if you want to be notified when it does. You cannot, however, set whether it only updates on Wifi rather than using up your precious mobile data, so I prefer the nice big update button on the top bar.
Feedly became my go-to news reading app when Google shut down the Reader service. From a simple RSS reader, Feedly has evolved into a complex service that lets you read and sync items on basically any device out there.Feedly allows you to save articles for later, share them with friends and family, and discover completely new content using the service's curated recommendations section.
Finally! After years of only having a web app (that's admittedly decent!), Google just released a full fledged app for Google Reader. If you're familiar with using Google Reader, it's exactly what you expect, only translated for the smaller screen. It doesn't have the style and pizazz of some other RSS apps but it's everything you need to get the news from your feeds (it supports multiple accounts too) and wonderful for any Google Reader user. One super cool feature: using the volume keys to navigate through feeds.
The News Republic app is a treat for visual design lovers. It is more of a tech feed and hence its geek nature that you have noticed. Also this app learns and automatically personalize for the audience. You will also get your own sharing and selecting the news.
The AP app is simple, but works. No night theme, only an on/off switch for notifications and a basic slider for font size adjustments, but it gets the job done in a pinch. AP, Associated Press, is one of the news sources that most other news organizations subscribes to, and the lucky thing about that is that by using the AP app, you can get this news quicker in some cases, especially if you head into the Press Release section.
Be mindful, though, the Press Release section has no real filter, so you may have to sift through releases for Entertainment and sports while looking for news releases. You can also report news to AP through the app, if you're someone who does that sort of thing.
Newsify provides Feedly account support or manual entry which then syncs with iCloud. Starting with the obvious, Newsify is more of a magazine style experience than it is an RSS feed. Newsify does have a list view though which can be accessed inside any feed in order to display a simpler way of scrolling through articles. There's no denying the interface is nicely done and manages to balance magazine style with quick reading. There's also a dark theme included for night time reading.
If you're a casual news browser and either use Feedly or don't mind entering feeds manually, the magazine style interface of Newsify is one of the best ones available.
Perhaps one of the most visually stunning apps on Google Play, Flipboard pretty much does exactly what the title says: you flip through a virtual pin board of news items, selected from the app’s wide range of categories. It’s available on phones and tablets, and the tablet version even has a dedicated interface so that it doesn’t look like a blown-up phone version.
For added connectivity to the most current and relevant news, the app also provides support for your Twitter and Facebook feeds, while LinkedIn, Instagram, Google+ and many other networks are supported.
Fark has long survived as one of the web's most popular sites, and one of the web's most trusted sources for a wide variety of important, interesting, and thoughtful topics…as well as offbeat and hilarious news that you won't find listed anywhere else on the web. Best of all, there are real people behind the service making sure that the best stories float to the top and the uninteresting ones disappear, still a different approach from the latest generation of social and crowd-curated news sites. If you're looking for an entertaining take on the news of the day, Fark and its community are the place to go.
These are my favorite apps when it comes to reading news stories but we know you guys have your favorites too. Do you use one of the apps mentioned above or something else? Sound off in the comments and let us know!