Sometimes it seems like there are only negative stories in the news, but those are often just the biggest stories. If you want to stay up to date with everything that’s happening in the world, as well as on topics that interest you, a mobile news app is the way to go.
While mobile news apps won’t hide sad or negative stories—and they shouldn’t—you can personalize your feed so you get the right mix between positive, negative and interesting content served to you. You can stay up to date with world business, sports, science and other major topics, as well as more niche topics like knitting, cats, photography, books, etc.
Flipboard and Google News are two of the most customizable news apps for both Android and iOS. See how they compare and find out which one is right for you.
Download: Flipboard for Android | iOS (Free)
Download: Google News for Android | iOS (Free)
User interface
Since these apps are updated regularly, the user interfaces on both are easy to navigate and overall a pleasant experience.
flip chart
If you like the feeling of flipping through a magazine, you’ll love Flipboard. That’s exactly how the app was designed to feel. You don’t need to create an account, but you should personalize your experience and organize and share stories with friends and family.
To get started with a personalized feed, Flipboard requires you to choose at least three topics to follow when you first use the app. Exploring the app is pretty intuitive and you’ll get a little tutorial at the beginning. You choose a news page to start with, flip the page by swiping your finger across the screen, then tap an article when you find an interesting one.
Google News
For anyone familiar with the interface of many of Google’s other mobile apps, learning how to use Google News should be a breeze. If you already have a Google account, you don’t need to create a new account to use Google News. Just select the Google account you want to associate with it and sign in.
The user interface of Google News is best described as minimalist. Like other Google apps, it’s clean, streamlined, and it’s easy to find everything you need, even if it’s your first time opening the app.
News Navigation
Each app has a different way of organizing your top stories and personalized stories, but one app isn’t necessarily better than the other. Which one you prefer depends on personal preference.
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When you open the Flipboard app for the first time, you’ll be greeted by For you tabs with personalized stories based on the topics you follow. You can customize this later, but initially, you’ll see a few different tabs that you can flip between: Daily version, Today’s Choiceand What is your passion?. As you move from one tab to another, you’ll find plenty of fair and balanced stories to flip through.
switch to Next tab, you’ll see all the hashtags you’re currently following. Tapping one of these squares opens a collection of the most recent articles published with that hashtag.
Or, if you just want to search around the app to find new people or websites to follow, you can tap the search icon at the bottom of the screen. This directs you to Discover tab where you can browse articles by category, like Technology & Science, Sports, Life, Musicand such.
Google News
The For you The tab in the Google News app shows you the date and local weather at the top of the screen, then personalized stories below. This screen is divided into Top stories, Local Newsand Choices for youwith related articles under each section title.
Swap to title tab, you can see the hottest stories around your country and around the world. These stories are filtered by category, including Business, Technology, Entertainment, Sports, Scienceand Health. These stories are not affected by any of your personal news preferences in the app.
above Next tab, you will see topic, source, Localand saved story. Whatever you see on this tab has been added by you. You can tap any of the icons on this screen to view stories specifically related to that topic or source, such as “Board Games” or “The New York Times”.
Then on Kip tab, you can find new sources to follow and add to your list of news stories that you watch every day.
Share news
You can easily share any story you come across from both Flipboard and Google News, but Flipboard might be the best choice if you often share stories with a certain group of people.
flip chart
Flipboard is a much more social app than Google News. You can create unique magazines for specific groups of friends or family members. This is great if you want to share articles about the game with your friends and articles about local news with your family. Or, you can simply share your profile on Flipboard, then people can follow the magazines they care about.
To share an entire magazine, you must first open it, tap the three vertical dots in the top-right corner, and then tap Repost. Or, if you want to share your entire profile, navigate to the profile tab at the bottom of the screen, tap the share icon at the top, and then send!
Google News
You can share an article in Google News without opening it by tapping the three vertical dots next to the article’s title and selecting Repost. Or if you open the article to read through before sharing, you’ll see a share icon at the bottom of the screen.
While you can share articles in almost any app, Google News favors sharing with people in your contact list, which you can find by searching for their name, number, and number. phone or email. One of the other top options you’ll see when trying to share an article is your Facebook News Feed and Facebook groups.
Unfortunately, you can’t share multiple stories at once from the Google News app. You can copy multiple links and paste them into a custom message for your friends, but you can’t share the entire magazine with everyone like you can in Flipboard.
Save the article for later
Both apps have an aesthetic way of presenting stories you’ve saved to read later, but Google News might have a slight edge here.
flip chart
To bookmark articles for later reading on Flipboard, you must first create a journal. You can title anything you want, such as “Read later” or “Saved Articles”. Then, when you come across an article that you don’t have time to read at the time, you can tap + in the gray bar at the top of the screen and select your newly created journal.
When you have time to read the stories you have saved, you must go to your profile and open the magazine in which you have published the stories. You can flip between stories and then delete them from your journal once you’ve finished reading them.
Google News
It’s a little easier to find and read stories you’ve saved to read later in the Google News app, especially if you’re already familiar with the interface of many other Google apps.
When you tap on a story that interests you, you can tap the save icon at the bottom of the screen and that story will automatically be added to your list. saved story. If you don’t want to open the article, you can click the vertical ellipsis and select Save for later.
To find your saved articles, navigate to Next tab at the bottom of the app. Scroll down until you see saved story. You’ll see the last few stories you saved first, but you can also scroll all the way down and tap View all and manage to see larger post tags with all your saved posts.
Google News seems to have a more streamlined way of organizing the articles you want to read later, so if you frequently bookmark posts this might be the better mobile news app for you.
Which mobile news app is better?
Unless you’re intrigued by the flip mechanism in the Flipboard app, or you want to share a bunch of articles with family and friends, I’d use the Google News app. The user interface is simpler, Google organizes news from its search engine, and saving articles for later viewing is much more intuitive in the Google News app. Flipboard isn’t a bad mobile news app; Google News is just slightly better.
