Terrified by the rise of fake news? Want headlines beamed into your eyes? Check out Stuff’s reliably-sourced dossier of news apps for keeping you in the loop. Luckily all of them are free and available both on iOS and Android.
Google News
This one doesn’t hang about. Fire up the app and it hurls a five-story briefing at your face. Scroll to delve into more personalised content, or tap tabs to peruse headlines and topics. Not keen on who’s doing the reporting? Tap the ‘Full coverage’ button to see how others have covered the story – or use the ‘three dots’ menu to block a specific source entirely.
It could be argued that Twitter broke many people’s trust in news, but it’s still a good bet for following stories as they break and develop. Use the search tab to peruse recent trends and stories. Manual searches get you to what’s happening this second, while all those sluggish news sites scramble to catch up (and printing presses crank up ready to give you the exact same info tomorrow morning).
Lack of time during the day makes it all too easy to skim headlines and not get to the meat of stories. With Pocket, you save articles for later, when they can be read in the app itself, stripped of all junk (and pictures). And if your eyes won’t thank you for subjecting them to long reads on the way home, Pocket can – via a single tap – transform your list into an audio playlist.
Feedly
For publications you love even more dearly than Stuff, to the point that you daren’t risk missing a single headline, there’s Feedly. Subscribe to a site and its stories are squirted straight into your inbox. The in-app reader is fast and efficient, and there’s a web browser for feeds limited to synopses. The app can also act as an engine to drive other RSS clients, like the fabulous Reeder on iOS.
On a phone – but especially on a tablet – Flipboard wants to engage your eyes as much as your brain. Essentially a fancy RSS client, it combines algorithmically generated feeds with user-defined ‘magazines’. What you get is an image-rich experience packed with pics, and also quite a lot of ‘flipping’ by way of the app’s digital take on page-turning.
If you resolutely refuse to engage with anything on your phone that doesn’t look like a messaging system, try Reddit. The main news feed is a bit US-orientated, but pretty much every story makes its way to the site eventually, followed by a string of people yelling at each other about it. Delve right in or look on in horror, but realise that one day all news will be presented this way.
