Personalized applications seem to be the way of things, now at least, and Microsoft has a new one that has just been launched onto Android called News Pro that is designed to provide users with news that is tailored to their particular interests and content that they may find enjoyable. Although this is coming from Microsoft, it’s a Microsoft Garage Project app, which means it is an experimental offering of sorts and not from the regular crop of Microsoft apps such as Word, Excel, SharePoint, and others. While News Pro aims to deliver stories that are tailored to you, it also allows you to browse and search for stuff to read at your leisure, and in doing so the app can better recommend and feed you stories to read in the future once it has a more accurate understanding of things you would generally read.
In direct relation to this, News Pro offers up the option to sign into the app with social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn so it can deliver news and interests that may tie into your daily work life as well. Beyond this, if you’re simply looking to browse through what’s on offer in News Pro, the app boasts more than one million news topics spanning various categories so there is likely always something that you may find enjoyable.
As the app learns your interests, it will begin to recommend articles to read, and it may even offer up suggestions on websites to check out that have articles you may enjoy reading based on those interests. Beyond the learning aspect of News Pro, there are a few features listed in the app’s description that could be of interest to users, such as the forums and group boards where users can have discussions about particular articles, share news and more. There is also a feature which the Microsoft Garage team says will “surprise you” once you upload a selfie and share it with the app, although none of these features seem to be baked into News Pro just yet. The main page is simply endless scrolling of highlighted news stories that surface based on whichever method you use to login to the app, and a tap on the settings button in the top left corner reveals no dashboard or other means to access the other listed features. Despite this, though, News Pro seems to offer up relevant content that will at the very least be of interest as it cherry picks from stuff you’re likely already engaging with, and that’s a plus in itself if that’s something you’ve been wanting. News Pro is free to install and you can grab it from the Play Store.
