The Google News & Weather app received a significant client-side update earlier this week, with the Alphabet-owned company introducing the latest build of its mobile service on Wednesday. The home page of the app now sports a fully featured bottom navigation bar allowing users to quickly open their Headlines and local updates, in addition to navigating to a highly personalized “For You” section of the service with a single tap. The main user interface of Google News & Weather was also ennobled with the addition of a thin topic carousel situated between the section title and news article cards. The newly introduced element will provide you with the option of quickly browsing through a number of subjects directly from your home page. The functionality itself was already available in the app for some time now but was tucked away in its navigation drawer. With Google apparently seeking to draw the attention of its users to this feature in a more direct manner, the scrollable topic shortcuts have now been moved to the forefront of Google News & Weather.
The Mountain View, California-based company also moved the Weather widget from the Headlines tab to the Local one, in addition to reorganizing the app’s settings in an effort to make its many functionalities more presentable and easier to search for. In between those additions and the aforementioned browsable stream of topics, it seems that the latest update for Google News & Weather is primarily aimed at making the app more intuitive and user-friendly. The changelog released alongside the new version of the service also mentions that the latest build introduces several bug fixes and other smaller tweaks, though it doesn’t clarify on the matter.
Google News & Weather is one of those Google-made products that have been around for a while now and while the tech giant is presently more actively developing some other Android apps, the service continues to be supported to this date. Google has been experimenting with implementing weather forecasts and news aggregators into many of its solutions for years and the company is seemingly still looking to pursue similar efforts in the future, with an update on its endeavors expected to follow shortly.
