While the iOS social news reader Flipboard has been making all the news recently, Google launched a new social news reader app called Google Currents to rival the Flipboard. It not only works on Android devices but also on iOS devices and if you find yourself reading popular publications on your mobile device, download this free Social News Reader App for Android and iOS devices and get the latest news and stories in a beautiful magazine style format.
Google Currents works on both tablets and phones running Android 2.2 and up as well as iOS devices. Once you sign in to Google Currents with your Google credentials, you can subscribe to your favorite stories from big publications such as Forbes, Techcrunch, Popular Science, 500px, Fast Company and more for free. Google Currents promises to deliver videos, full-length articles, slideshows, maps, and social streaming in a more user friendly format.
Google Currents also supports offline reading. What makes Google Currents a cool app is the fact that it makes of Google’s unique search technology to get the latest trending topics on various subjects such as science, technology, politics, sport, entertainment and more. You can even convert your Google reader subscriptions and other blog feeds into a magazine styled reading edition.
You can also share your favorite stories with your friends and contacts with a few taps and have your Google Currents subscriptions automatically synced with all your compatible Android devices.
Google Currents also offers good news for content publishers. Bloggers and content creators can package their stories and videos, customize and publish them to Google Currents so that other users can subscribe to such content. Another plus is the fact that content publishers can collect and analyze page view data as the app is integrated with Google Analytics.
The app does have a few drawbacks. For instance, sharing stories on Facebook or Twitter is not one click away, but two. That is you need to navigate to the More options to reach out to the social platforms that you most often interact with. Also, it’s not quite as easy to comment on stories from within the app. Since the initial feedback on the app is that it doesn’t match up to other social news reading apps, it must be said that the app is at its infancy and one hopes that Google will learn and improve based on user feedback.
Meanwhile, you can download the app from the Android market or use the QR code to try it out yourself and let us know what you think of the app in the comments section.
Download Google Currents for Android ( check availability in your country)
Download Google Currents for iOS ( check availability in your country)
Leave a Reply