Overall, the best, but could be better – Microsoft Start Review

Nov. 2017. The strengths of this app is that it collects news from a wide variety of reputable sources. You can also add your own topics which is nice. You can scroll from article to article without having to go back to the menu, and these articles can fill the entire screen if one wants. This app strikes the right balance between text and pictures for the top level menus. The pictures are helpful because they quickly identify what the topic is, but they are small enough to make scrolling quick and easy. The headlines are enough to identify the topic as well. The scrolling both within and between articles is very smooth. Finally, it is fairly uncluttered as far as advertisements ago, and that is always a big plus. Overall, this is quite well designed, and certainly one of the best, if not the very best news app available. However, there are some changes I would like to see: It would be nice to be able to select the order of the topics on the main menu, and include topics of your personal interests in the main menu. It would be nice to be able to customize it more. I wish that it had a homepage with all of the topics in one place so I could immediately select the top of my interest rather than scrolling through a menu. (News Republic has a good idea on this.) However, once you select a topic, it's nice to be able to scroll from one article to the next without having to go back to a previous menu which is a significant improvement over “SmartNews“. The font for the articles of themselves is pretty good, but a bolder and darker one would be even better. The font for the descriptions on the top level pages is quite thin and small and difficult to read. This could definitely be bolder and darker. (I often find myself going to Smart News first simply because visually it is easier to find the topics I wish to read about.) It took me a while to locate the separate settings to control the topics on the menu. I'm not sure why they were put at the bottom instead of with the other settings. It's a waste of screen real estate to have that bar across the bottom for that single purpose which one only uses now and then. It should be moved. As a rule of thumb for any news app on the phone, the developer should try to get as much reading real estate available as possible. There's no need for a large search bar at the top, for example. Simply having the search icon will suffice, and that would allow them to remove everything from the bottom bar and put it on the top. Finally, while the content providers seem to be pretty solid (Washington Post, New York Times, AP, Reuters, etc.) it would be nice to have some control over which ones are used or not. Still, compared to everything else out there, I find this to be one of the best news apps available for solid content and ease-of-use.
Review by Hazeldad on Microsoft Start.