Google Play Newsstand: The Best News App?

[salmanahmad]

I've been using Flipboard for as long as I can remember to read up on news, primarily because it was reliable and fast. But the animations in my opinion we're way too slow.

I recently discovered Feedly, also a great contender for the best news reader due to it's fast animations and scrolling.

But as time passed the Feedly app significantly bogged down and it would stutter while swiping in articles and scrolling in the menus, and this was dissapointing because I had never experienced performance issues in Flipboard. I immediately moved back to Flipboard.

Once again I couldn't deal with the slow animations, not lag, but the generally slow animations. I saw in an Android Central article about Play Newsstand that had been optimised for Android L.

So I decided to try it out and I was surprised by Google's amazing app, and to this day I have no complaints with the app.



It has an easy set up and it allows you add your own sources.

But the main thing I like about this app: the design and performance.

Android L's material design has taken how Android looks and feels to a whole new level of sophistication.



The tab switching is extremely smooth, the animations are eye candy, the articles load up fast and it shows the content in the app(instead of often redirecting you to Chrome) and the scrolling is also great. It does everything I need and it does it well.



Is there room for improvement? Definitely.

The app still has an "okay" rating, and I can see some scrolling issues every now and then on my Nexus 5. Also it runs terribly on older hardware, like the Galaxy S2, but apart from performance issues, other people seem to have issues with the feed not refreshing and so on...Google really needs to fix all that to secure the top spot.

However one thing I would like to add, I used Bing News on Windows Phone and Microsoft's app looks terrible infront of what Google has done, and I'm not sure about Apple in this regard.

But I wanted to ask what newsreader do you guys use and why? What are your options on NewsStand?

 

[B. Diddy]

I use Newsstand as well. It is much better than the previous Currents app (which was associated with big battery drain and memory hogging). Reading Entertainment Weekly on it is much smoother than using the NextIssue app. The New York Times looks great, so I don't have to install the separate NYTimes app.

 

[A895]

I went back to feedly, because it is more cross platform, I used maybe 5 hours today researching the best cross plat6form apps, and Feedly was one of the best news app I could find. Flipboard is good too, but it isn't good for trying to view your news quickly and viewing RSS feeds.
Play Newsstand on the other hand is fantastic, but a lot of the sites I read won't always be viewable inside the app, so it became a web link redirector more than a news app reader. Feedly at least has a built in browser for sites like that, so Feedly is better IMO.

 

[salmanahmad]

I use Newsstand as well. It is much better than the previous Currents app (which was associated with big battery drain and memory hogging). Reading Entertainment Weekly on it is much smoother than using the NextIssue app. The New York Times looks great, so I don't have to install the separate NYTimes app.

Haha yea the Currents app was associated with a lot of issues. In fact I saw quite a lot of YouTube videos where people said that if your Nexus 7 2012 was lagging, uninstall Currents and it will become faster.

Luckily Newsstand is nothing like that.

I went back to feedly, because it is more cross platform, I used maybe 5 hours today researching the best cross plat6form apps, and Feedly was one of the best news app I could find. Flipboard is good too, but it isn't good for trying to view your news quickly and viewing RSS feeds.
Play Newsstand on the other hand is fantastic, but a lot of the sites I read won't always be viewable inside the app, so it became a web link redirector more than a news app reader. Feedly at least has a built in browser for sites like that, so Feedly is better IMO.

I had the same problem with Feedly, it used to redirect me to it's browser way too much and the in-built browser was slow. Newsstand so far hasn't done this to me.

 

[Nerf72]

News stand is superb. This is how android is supposed to be!

My favourite app

 

[ryanr509]

I've been using Flipboard for as long as it has been out. I just read this post and I'm really liking the news stand app

 

[Javier P]

I find that Feedly is the best when trying to add some personal feeds. Some of them don't even appear with Flipboard or Newsstand.

Newsstand is the best with some feeds with "small print". With feedly I need to open them through the browser for a comfortable reading.

 

[indigogrl79]

Ok I use this.. love the tabs.. =]

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[doctorsnorky]

It's hard to beat play newsstand. My favorite until recently was inoreader, because it is multiplatform and constantly being improved, but newsstand is slicker. I have also used feedly, g2reader and a bunch of others. hope google doesn't abandon it like they did with greader.
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[vineydhiman]

No doubt in that, because Google developed products are always awesome and good thing about the apps in that all of them are available for free with lots of cool funtionality So my vote is "Yes"