What you need to know
- Google News is getting a redesign on Android that will make it easier to find useful articles with a new “Following” feed showing a series of cards that represent different areas of interest.
- When you tap on a card, you’ll see articles related to topics you’ve followed, and you can easily follow or unfollow certain topics from the “Library” section.
- The cards are automatically displayed in whatever order Google chooses, but there’s a way to reorganize them.
Google News’ “Following” tab has gotten a fresh coat of paint on Android, and it now pushes topics you care about straight to your feed on top of the sources you’re following.
The new customizable Following feed displays all of the topics you’re interested in, alongside the publications you’ve added to your library. A series of cards appear at the top of the page, and when you tap one, you’ll be greeted with a feed of related stories that include the headline, source, and date of publication. The feed quite resembles Google Chrome’s homepage on mobile and the Google app’s Discover feed.
You will also be able to easily unfollow topics from the “Library” section, which now displays a list of all the topics and sources that you’re following. When you navigate to the full list of topics in your Library, Google News gives you the option to nudge a certain topic to the home screen or move it to the top or bottom of the list.
If you move a topic around in the list, it’ll similarly move around in the Following tab. This means you can reorganize your topic cards however you want, just by changing the order in the list. Unfortunately, there’s no way to reshuffle the cards directly on the Following page, because Google sorts them based on a variety of factors.
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Nonetheless, the redesign makes finding the stories you’re interested in a lot easier using the news aggregation app. Prior to this update, users could only see the sources they had followed, and all of the topics they were interested in were only visible in the “For you” feed. While doing so, only general topics such as world news, health, finance, and technology could be followed, which were organized according to the whims of Google’s algorithm.
As per 9to5Google, the update is currently rolling out on Google News for Android (version 5.86), but Google previously vowed to make it available on iOS at a later time this year. It was first unveiled in June.