One of The Best News Apps – News Republic-World News,Video Review

This is my favorite news app, and I use a lot of them. It has a very nice, smooth, interface that enables you to scroll quickly, but the last several versions have cluttered it up with sharing buttons at the top and the bottom and below every article. It's a step backwards. What makes this a truly fantastic app is that you can customize the content, the news sources, and also the order in which content appears on your homepage. No other app does all this. Very nice indeed! So So Content. While this app has numerous providers, it lacks some very significant ones such as ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Politico, and many others. I find myself turning to Smart News more often because the stories are more interesting. Great Homepage The homepage has all of the major sections with the lead stories right there. I don't have to hunt for the section I want to start with, and I don't have to depend on the app deciding for me what I want to see first. This is a great system. Still Needs Work. One of the more recent updates ruined the interface on the article screens. Once you pick your topic at the top level, you move to series of articles. For some bizarre reason every single article has three buttons below them allowing you to react or share. But how could one possibly know how or whether to react or share an article that hasn't been read? In the meantime by having them below every single article, you can only see two articles at a time. If you're on the home screen you can get to anything fairly easily, but if you drill down very far, you have to tap the back arrow repeatedly to get back to the home screen. The home button is one most people probably use continually every day. It's a shame they deleted it. The connections button is the little logo at the top right that shows you how your topic is connected to other topics. Personally, I never use it. Perhaps others do, but I cannot see how that would be more important than a home button. I'm not sure what they were thinking… The "My News" appears to be just another variation of the digest screen which still remains. I'm not sure why we need two versions of this. The floating share icon appears when you scroll the top sharing buttons out of sight, but again it's totally unnecessary as most articles have sharing buttons built into them already. In fact, rather than leaving the sharing button at the bottom out of the way, they have sharing buttons at the top and bottom. There's a button for Facebook, Twitter, and email, and then another button that allows you to share with any of those. That last button does everything the previous three do and then some, so again it's a complete waste of screen real estate. Really all that is needed is one share button. If the developers would understand that what people want to do is read the news first and foremost, they would eliminate all of those buttons and simply replace them with one discrete button on the top menu bar. There are a few improvements that I would like to see: First, add a few more conservative news outlets since most of the current ones are on the liberal side. Second, Restore the Home Button! Third, delete the floating share icon. Fourth, add major media outlets if possible.
Review by Hazeldad on News Republic-World News,Video.