Must-Have News Apps for Android and iOS

Sitting down to read a traditional newspaper isn’t an activity that most future generations will experience. It’s enjoyable and relaxing, but fewer and fewer people are doing it. Why? Technology has changed the way we receive and consume information. Social media provides us with a personalized view of the world, based on what our peers, friend and family decide to share. RSS feeds, official news company apps, and other news aggregators help us keep tabs on news topics that we deem important. The benefit of news apps is that they allow us to create custom sections and prioritize, sort, and select the feeds we want to read about. So which apps should you be using?

Each of the following suggested apps is available for Android and iOS devices:

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AP Mobile

Many local newspapers gather stories from the AP News Wire anyway, so this app can take you directly to the source of headlining stories in the U.S. The home page design uses a clean and refreshing tile view, which can be customized to display categories like U.S. News, World, Oddities, Business, and Technology. Tapping the settings gear lets you remove categories that you find uninteresting. You probably won’t need to squint at the headlines, since they are printed in a large font that spreads horizontally across your screen. These large article buttons make it easy to swipe and select stories, especially if you’re browsing one-handed (and eating breakfast with the other). Once an article is open, you can “Like” it on Facebook, share via email or social media, or “star”it for future reference.

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BBC News

Keep tabs on what’s going on across the pond with this U.K. and Global news source. The BBC News home screen has a lot more going on than the AP News app, with multiple categories displayed as scrolling rows across your screen. However, just like the AP News app, you can tap “Edit” to remove or reorganize categories. The default font size is quite small, but this can be tweaked within an article. Readers can share stories via social media and email, but there is no in-app bookmarking system to save reads for later.

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Feedly

This is the perfect app for people who want to control their news reading experience right down to its content and presentation. Once you download and install Feedly, you will be prompted to sign in with your Google account. This is where all of your app data and personalized news streams are stored.

Not a big fan of magazine style news feeds? With Feedly you can change the layout by jumping into the settings and choosing “title only” or “list” in the “Default View” section. This will arrange all of your news stories as no-nonsense, text-only items. For the visually inclined, you can choose “magazine” or “grid” to spice up your newspaper with images pulled from the articles. You can then search for specific news sites and categories to add to your fee.

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Flipboard

This is the ultimate app for readers that prefer a magazine-style experience. Navigation can be a little tricky during the first few uses. Flipboard relies almost completely on page-turning swipes to scroll through articles. Flipboard comes pre-programmed with popular news content subscriptions, which you can customize or delete from the settings. Unlike Feedly, you can also tie your social media accounts into Flipboard, so that your friends’ news posts appear within the magazine interface.

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Pocket

Unlike a traditional newspaper, there’s no way for us to get through all the news we come across online. The Internet has an infinite amount of pages and bloggers are doing a pretty good just filling them. With social media streams, news feeds and websites grappling for our attention, wouldn’t it be great if we could save all of those interesting articles to read later? This is where Pocket comes in – it is a cloud account and mobile app that lets you save digital articles to read later. Over 300 different news apps sync with Pocket so you don’t even have to switch apps to bookmark the articles you want to read later. Saved articles are arranged in list view (like the AP Mobile format) and load in a minimalistic article view, which means you can concentrate on just the article without ads.

Loraine Kanervisto FOLLOW >

Loraine Kanervisto has been writing business, technology, and lifestyle features since 2008. She loves exploring how diverse communities interact with technology. Loraine spends her time tinkering with gadgets, exploring Seattle's lit scene, and hanging out with her two black cats.