The free News360 iPhone app advertises itself as a far-reaching news aggregator. I suppose it is, but its sources and interface design fall short of other similar apps.
At the top of the app is a long, horizontally scrolling list of news categories, including “World News,” “Entertainment,” “Business,” etc. You select one of the categories, and you are given about 10 headlines, which are viewable by swiping left on your screen.
But here is where it gets a little awkward. If you want to read a story, you tap on the headline, and it takes you to another screen with a picture and just a paragraph or two of text. Below the nutgraf are about three dozen other headlines, which gives it a jumbled, distracted feeling.
If you want to read more than that, you have to tap on “read full article,” and then you are transported to the original source of the story, typically a newspaper’s website.
Further, the developer of the app is a tech company based in Moscow, and yet all of the sources for the content of the app seem to be American -- or at the very least, from the West. They include the Huffington Post, Fox, The Wall Street Journal, and so on. I would like to see some alternative sources, especially given that this app originated from somewhere outside of the United States.
rkarachinsky
Hi Megan, I'm part of the team that is developing News360, and I'm sorry you didn't like our app.
Our goal is to provide a quick overview of the main stories of the day, and to show all the different points of view of sources covering a story, which is why, for each story, we're showing articles and photos about the story from hundreds of different sources. You should also check out our favorites feature, which allows you to follow more than 100,000 different objects (people, companies, brands, locations and so on).
We can't, unfortunately, show full texts of articles, since we respect the copyright and licensing requirements of content provides, but we are working on expanding our sources (we're adding more than 900 local and international news sites in the next two weeks), so you should see better coverage of your local events. Even now, though, we have english-language sources from the UK, India, Australia, China, Russia and other countries from around the world.
We also have a 2.0 version coming in the next couple of weeks, which will add landscape mode, and a bunch of other helpful features.
We've seen an amazing response to our app in the App Store, and from direct feedback from users (our average rating right now is 4.5 stars based on more than 700 ratings), so I hope you give us another chance when the update comes out.
Thanks,
Roman Karachinsky
News360
Associated Apps: News360 (Old Version)