How to Get Started With the New Microsoft News App
Android, iOS: The news app formerly known as MSN was relaunched Wednesday called Microsoft News . The free iOS and Android app uses artificial intelligence and human editors to collect stories from thousands of sources into thematic feeds. It also has a Local News tab for news from your current city or another location you care about, as well as a dark mode to make the news easier for your eyes to read, even if it’s not so easy for the soul these days.
Getting Started with Microsoft News
When you open Microsoft News for the first time, you will be prompted to sign in to your Microsoft account so that the app can sync your interests and settings across devices, but this is not required. Next, you will be shown a list of news topics and asked to select your interests. The app selects several on your behalf, such as Top Stories and Entertainment; other options include things like NCAA football, personal finance, good news, politics, and technology.
Once you’ve selected your interests, you’ll read most of your reading in the News tab at the far left of the bottom toolbar. At the top is a side-scrolling list of your selected themes. You can scroll through topics and tap one to jump to it, or simply swipe left or right to see the next or previous topic on your list.
Each page includes easy-to-read article titles, as well as a main image, source, and publication date. The header sometimes has no image, and some tall images will scroll inside their image fields as you scroll up and down the page.
You will also see sponsored posts in the app – we noticed HelloFresh ads in the Politics section and ads for auto insurance quotes in the Technology section – but these are clearly marked as SPONSORSHIP above the headline along with the name of the company that publishes the news. the source will go.
Reading news
Clicking on the title of an article opens it full screen and offers a damn satisfying reading. While you can enable dark mode for the app all over the place in the settings (the far right tab on the bottom toolbar), you can also click the moon button located in the upper right corner of each page of the article to quickly switch to dark mode. The button switches to the sun, which you can press to return to standard mode, black text on white.
The top toolbar on the article page also has a slider to increase or decrease the font size by one size. This does not affect the heading, and while the larger font is easier to read, it is not much larger than the standard font.
At the bottom of the article, you will see two previews (title and image) for the Up Next articles. You can click on one to jump to it, or just keep scrolling – the next one will be shown straight up, like another episode of the series on Netflix.
Videos are displayed only in the Videos section, where they are not accompanied by articles. If you don’t save the Video theme, you won’t see the video in the app at all, which you might find refreshing. In any case, the article pages load very quickly.
Search for additional sources
The Overview tab on the bottom toolbar allows you to add topics by interest and also has a search field where you can enter keywords to create search-driven topics based on Bing. I set Lifehacker as a theme to see if Bing would only download articles from Lifehacker, and he did find results from Lifehacker and Lifehacker Australia, as well as lifehack articles from other sites.
However, special topics such as this one may contain some articles that are not formatted for Microsoft News. They are displayed in the browser built into the application, so they look and work the same as a website. For example, in our Lifehacker thread, Lifehacker Australia articles were reformatted in the style of Microsoft News, and regular Lifehacker articles opened in a browser on lifehacker.com.
Bypass
If you are into a topic, you can scroll down to read all of its stories one by one. The back arrow at the top of the article will take you back to the topic page, where you can click a different title. You can also swipe left on an article to go to the next one if you like the page-flipping approach. The bottom toolbar of the application is always present, so you can always click the “News” button in the far left corner to return to the page of the last viewed topic.
Flaws
Notifications cannot be configured yet – they are turned on or off. We’d like to see options to enable or disable topic notifications, set a Do Not Disturb schedule, and even receive blacklisted notifications from specific sources or specific keywords. The app is meant to notify you of the latest news, but I haven’t received any alerts so far.
The Local News tab was also a mess in my testing, showing Bing results that weren’t news or were old news headlines that were causing “page not found” errors. Hopefully this is just a day one glitch that the company can quickly fix because the Local tab is useless right now.
Microsoft News doesn’t offer much that Apple News, Google News, and Flipboard don’t, but they are free and have a nice dark mode. If you use Microsoft News products on other platforms like Windows 10 or Xbox, you might want to appreciate the mobile version that stays in sync. Just don’t let the news upset you too much.