Google released a new magazine and news-reading application for Android today designed to bring your entire daily reads together into one piece of software in aesthetic way. The new app, called Newsstand is a news aggregator, features both magazines and newspapers, and you can add feeds from blogs and other websites as well. Google says as you use the app, it will learn what kinds of sources and stories you prefer and begin presenting a tailored experience.
The app is launching with full length (rather than summary or preview) content from newspapers like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, and magazines such as Vanity Fair and WIRED. Although stories from various publications will be presented side by side with each other, you can also import your existing magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
The Play Newsstand will feature about 1,900 free and paid publications. The selection ranges from newspapers like The Australian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to magazines like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired and free blogs and news sites that have partnered with Google.
As per Google announcement, the app was developed by the same team as Currents and it will likely feel familiar to existing Currents users. Over the next few days, users in the U.S., Canada, U.K. and Australia (that is, all the countries where the old Google Play Magazines app was available) will be automatically upgraded to the new Newsstand app. Currents users can upgrade to Play Newsstand by downloading the app and all their news sources will be automatically transferred.
Currents first launched about two years ago as a way to read free sources, but it also featured tools for publishers that allowed them to add their sites to the app and customize their appearance by adding feeds, photos and social updates. This publisher program, Google tells me, will continue.
It’s not Google’s first effort at something like this, but it brings together many of the features of Play Magazines and Currents, Google’s previous reading apps, into a single interface. (The former was essentially a magazine store and reading experience, while the latter was a Flipboard style application that also gave a curated news experience from a variety of sources.) But unlike Currents, Newsstand has quite a few tools designed to let publishers better control their content. It supports paywalls, for example. Read a story from The New York Times, and it will count as one of your 15 free stories for the month, but also give you the opportunity to subscribe from within the app. Meanwhile, magazines show up when a new issue comes out, not on a story-by-story basis, and clicking on the cover image that comes up in the Newsstand feed will take you to a fully designed version of the magazine’s app (if it has one) that runs inside Newsstand.
It also has features designed to help you drill down onto stories you care about. Google calls these topic tags. A story on the senate’s hearing on Bitcoin, for example, might have a Bitcoin tag in the lower right corner. Click on it, and you’ll get more Bitcoin-related stories. The more you dive into these, the more you will see over time. Google says it’s also pulling in signals from outside of Newsstand, such as search queries and presumably what you’re looking at if you’re logged into the Chrome browser. Although it makes some use of location, the company says that’s not a main focus for news delivery yet.
The Play Newsstand will feature about 1,900 free and paid publications. The selection ranges from newspapers like The Australian, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to magazines like The New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Wired and free blogs and news sites that have partnered with Google.
Google says this new app will “put the news you care about most front and center and presents stories that interest you based on your tastes. The more you read the better it will get.” The app will automatically format blog posts and other sources for reading on a tablet or phone. Users will be able to subscribe to new sources in the app and – for paid publications – in the Google Play store. Posts are cached on the device for offline reading.
[gdl_icon type=” icon-fighter-jet” color=”#FF0000″ size=”16px”] Download Google Newsstand from Google Playstore
[gdl_icon type=” icon-fighter-jet” color=”#FF0000″ size=”16px”] Download Flipboard from Google Playstore
Google will launch Google Newsstand for iOS somewhere early 2014 by releasing an upgrade to Google current.