Google News is reportedly getting a new icon and adding magazines into the mix, in addition to adding YouTube news videos, providing users with a centralized place to grab all of these types of content. The update to the News app is supposed to happen at Google I/O 2018 according to the details and will not only add new content types as well as a refreshed icon for users, but it’s also said that this shift will result in the end of the Play Newsstand app, as Google won’t have a need for a second application where it surfaces digital magazine content.
Like much of Google’s efforts in various sectors of its services, Google is looking to consolidate all of its news content to make things easier to find, read, and view. Naturally having everything in one app would make for less searching or browsing as there would be no need to jump from Google News to Play Newsstand if you wanted to grab digital magazine content that wasn’t available in Google News. Likewise the same thing would happen for YouTube news videos – users would be able to cut out the action of jumping over to YouTube to watch a certain video.
In addition to the changes for both the News and Newsstand apps, Google is also applying the revamp to the Google News website on both the web and mobile web platforms, so users will see a streamlined design across all the platforms where Google News is available. What’s more is that the new Google News app will be built on the Accelerated Mobile Pages technology so when pulling up content it’ll be quicker to load and access, which means reading and viewing things faster and less time waiting around. With Google I/O 2018 coming up next week it won’t be long before Google officially unveils these new changes, though there is no guarantee that Google will roll out the new app at the same time.