Sometimes you're looking for a specific news topic, so I made sure search and filter capabilities allowed you to do that.Ĭustomization. Each app organizes its content differently, but I wanted to see some sort of category-based organization, whether that was tabs, side panels, grouped content, or anything else. I wanted to see what options were available for engaging with the content (e.g., a comment section or share options).Ĭategories. The news needed to be presented well and organized intuitively on a custom feed.Ĭontent interaction. I kept that all in mind as I was reviewing the apps.Īs I tested, here's what I kept my eye out for. As a result, those news apps tend to pull articles from lesser-known publications, providing a wider selection of news than apps like Apple News, for example, which mainly promotes news from more prominent sources. Most of the apps on this list pull from the same news sources, but you'll notice that certain apps (like NewsBreak and Google News) prioritize free stories over subscription-only sources.

Testing involved downloading each app, choosing a few sources and topics to follow, exploring the types of news articles on offer, and taking note of the user experience over a few weeks of testing. I tested each app on an iPhone XR running on iOS 16.1.1. I know most folks don't look at their news on a desktop, so I also focused on mobile apps. And while I might get some flak for it, Reddit and other social media apps also weren't up for consideration. I also left out any apps that are owned by companies that do their own journalism-like CNN, Fox News, and Reuters. Read-it-later apps and RSS readers can aggregate news for you, but they're more hands-on, and really a different category of app. For more details on our process, read the full rundown of how we select apps to feature on the Zapier blog.įor this roundup, I looked at primarily news aggregator apps. We're never paid for placement in our articles from any app or for links to any site-we value the trust readers put in us to offer authentic evaluations of the categories and apps we review. We spend dozens of hours researching and testing apps, using each app as it's intended to be used and evaluating it against the criteria we set for the category. All of our best apps roundups are written by humans who've spent much of their careers using, testing, and writing about software.

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