Description: Anews is an Android app that’s built to make it easy for you to browse through news sources that you know and trust on a variety of different topics, all from within the same app. With a handful of different editions, it’s not just those based in the US that can enjoy Anews and the app has been designed with a UI that looks good and is easy to use. You needn’t leave the app to keep on reading your selected news story as Anews can load websites directly within its clean interface. You can easily organize and add new sources to your chosen interests and it’s nice and simple to move things around and go from a-to-b as the UI is designed with gestures in mind. Let’s take a closer look at just what Anews has to offer.
How it Works: As with everything on Android, you’ll first need to download Anews from the Play Store. Once you have the app installed, you’ll need to create a new account, so the app can remember your chosen interests and sources. I just logged in with Google, which made things quite a bit easier than other apps.
After that, you’ll be asked to choose which edition you’d like, which also neatly tells you which countries are supported.
Unsurprisingly, the next step is to choose which subjects you want to read about when using Anews, I found that there was a fairly broad selection on offer here and you can always add specific sources to these general categories from the Catalog later on.
The main feed of Anews is then broken into different sections relating to the categories that you chose when you first set everything up. You can slide left to right in order to see more stories, and you just scroll up and down to get through your different categories.
To open up a news story, just go ahead and click on it and it’ll ask you to read the story on the respective news sources’ website.
Unlike other apps though, you don’t need to leave the app to read the full story as there’s a web browser built right into the app, making the experience pretty consistent overall.
All of the usual news app features like the ability to comment and share articles are here as well, which was nice to see. I was also pleased to see it was nice and easy to add more sources to a category from the extensive list included in Anews’ catalog
Opinion: As someone who obviously needs to keep up to speed with the news, I’ve seen and used a lot of these types of apps. Some of them are more equal than others, but Anews is one of the more pleasing I’ve come across. It doesn’t necessarily offer anything that you can’t find in other similar apps, but it’s level of polish is refreshing and the UI is really easy on the eye and more importantly, easy to navigate. The cobalt and red theme running throughout the app looks nice and I enjoyed the ability to keep reading a news story inside the app, even if I was taken to another website. While nothing too special, I did find that Anews suited most of my needs, but as a UK resident I was bitterly disappointed to not see a UK edition of the app. For my US colleagues though Anews is a decent recommendation and it’s also usable in parts of Europe, too.
Ratings
- Speed (4/5) – Anews runs great and there’s no need to wait around for stories to load or anything like that, it all happens nice and quickly.
- Features (4/5) – Offering a similar, and well stocked, amount of features that you’ll find in similar apps, Anews ticks all of the right boxes and there’s no need to spend oodles of time figuring out how to use the app or what you want to add to your categories.
- Theme (4.5/5) – The cobalt and red theme that runs throughout the app is certainly easy to look at and it gave Anews a professional and consistent look and feel no matter what I was reading.
- Overall (4/5) – As news apps go, of which there are many available on Android, Anews might not be the revolution you were looking for, but it looks good, is built to a high standard and runs really well.
Pros
- Easy to get to started with some decent reading material about topics that you love and enjoy.
- Good-looking UI that’s easy to navigate through swipes and gestures as you go from story-to-story.
- Websites are rendered within the app, keeping your history clean and the overall experience consistent.
- Good offering of different worldwide sources.
Cons
- No UK edition, despite offering editions for the US.
- While cleanly presented, it can be a pain having to read a news story on their website.
Conclusion: There’s a whole bunch of these news apps already available for Android, but such a diverse choice is what makes the platform so strong and Anews is a worth addition. It looks good, is easy to get set up with thanks to sign-ins available for every major social network and there’s a lot of good news sources included here. Picking your favorite sources is nice and simple and there are a lot of others available in the catalog whenever you feel like adding them. All-in-all, Anews is a news app that’s consistent, speedy and easy to use without asking too much of its users. A quality experience that might be the news app that ‘clicks’ with you where others didn’t, Anews is worth taking a look at.