The consumption of News by the public has evolved a lot in the last 2 decades. The print Newspapers and magazines are the major sources of reliable news in the 20th century. At the beginning of 21st century, the Live satellite broadcast by the TV channels gained the public attention in news consumption. But, today both of these mediums highly depends on the smartphone users. The smartphones changed the entire arena of News media. The public wants to know the news as quickly as possible. The smartphones are able to provide it. At the same time, the volume of news content has grown enormous in the last few years. Now the consumers want the curated news content to ease the way of picking the news topics. The apps are doing it well and there are multiple apps and formats available too. Here, we tried to pick different choice of best News apps for free on Android.
Best News Apps for Free – Android
1. Google Play Newsstand
Google Play Newsstand is the best news app for Android with more than 1 billion installs over the time. This app includes thousands of news sources, which includes both free and premium. The best thing about this app comes with the personalization options. Google understands the interests of the user based on their selections and feedbacks. There are a lot of categories available inside the app to choose the content we like. We can also download the news or stories and able to read offline. Of course, this is the best choice among International News app. Also, it is one of the most downloaded news app for Android.
2. Flipboard: News Of Our Time
Flipboard is a different type of medium, which curates news, stories, and conversations and provides them to the users with their personalized interests. Flipboard has a strong fan and follower base unlike any other news app or medium. It is because of the user interface and feels good news app experience, it gives to its users. Flipboard is a place where the users share their stories with other users. Along with the news from media, these personalized stories adds more value to this app. In the play store, Flipboard installed over 10 million times and received positive feedback from over million users.
3. Google News & Weather
Google News and Weather app is relatively a news app with extensive weather information, which we cannot be able to get in most of the news apps. Amazingly, it provides news from over 75,000 publications. The location permission is optional with this app. If the location access is given, it could be helpful for the app to show local weather. The users can also deny the location access permission. This app got over 100 million installs in the play store.
4. BBC News
BBC is one of the well-known reliable news sources around the globe. They cover news across the globe and has a strong network to do that. In this app, BBC providing all news categories and stories to its users. Like other apps, you can choose the topics that interest you. Another category is “Most read and Most watched” stories. Other than this, a 24-hour Live BBC World service radio available for all its users. There are no restrictions on the video and audio sections. With this app, the users can enjoy all of the BBC news contents free of cost, of course, they manage this app with the help of mobile advertisements. This app was installed more than 10 million times in the play store.
5. SmartNews: Breaking News Headlines
SmartNews is mostly about the trending news rather than a deep story and analysis type of Journalism. If you are tracking the current global breaking news, then SmartNews could be the best choice for you. It claims to have more than 25 million readers from 100+ countries. You can also fetch the news and read it offline.
6. Bundle Breaking News
This app delivers breaking news instantly when anything happens around the globe. This app is one of the best news aggregator available for Android. This app has packed with over 10,000 news sources, it includes, online publishers, magazines, newspapers, and blogs from 22 countries. The user will get instant push message whenever it updates a breaking news. Also, the user can search topics from various categories including local stories. This app has a bookmark and reads later option. The design and interface is a special thing to mention about this app. In the play store, Bundle Breaking News installed more than 5 million times.
7. Pocket
Pocket is not a primary news app, but it is a tool to save an article, video or any web link to read later. This read it later feature captures the stories added by the users and allows other users to find what the hottest article, video or web link is shared and viewed in the Pocket. You can follow other users and can choose the categories, you like the most. The best part in this is the content curation is completely done by the users of Pocket. It can be synchronized across devices and browsers (Safari, Firefox, Chrome). It has a special Text-To-Speech (TTS) tool to read the article. Pocket managed to have 30 million users across various platforms and saved 2 billion items and growing.
8. Feedly – Get Smarter
Feedly is an advanced RSS feeder and best news feed app. Like any RSS system, you can add your favorite blog using its RSS feed. If you can’t able to find RSS feeds, you can search for the topics or websites you like to follow, in Feedly. The users of Feedly finds it is easy to organize and follow the topics and blogs they like the most. It has over 5 million installs in the Play store.
We also want to mention two news apps other than the above – MSN News – Breaking Headlines and AP Mobile – Breaking News. Former is an app from Microsoft and the second one is from Associated Press.
Conclusion
We like the Google Play Newsstand as the best news app in Android. To follow blogs and stories, we like Flipboard, Pocket, and Feedly. All the three of them are different in the way they work. It is up to the users to pick the app of their choice. For breaking news follow up, SmartNews is a good choice.
We have picked the best news apps for free from the Android store. Maybe, we have missed a few of the good apps in this list. If you know any such, please mention it in the comment section.