Google have released a new way for Android users to stay up to date with their news; decrying the ways people have to access news now through different websites, apps, and of course traditional media, Google believes that having one place to access all this news would be a better idea.
In that vein, Google has today announced the Google Play Newsstand, which will replace Google Play Magazines in coming days as the update rolls out to users. Claiming to bring all your favourite news sources together in one place with a single user experience, Play Newsstand will be able to bring you news that interests you, based on your tastes. In the same simple interface you’ll be able to view traditional full-length articles, images, audio and video in the one app. You can even save articles for offline reading.
Google have boasted more than 1,900 free and paid, full length publications that you can access through Play Newsstand, including the following:
- Newspaper Subscriptions: Full-length content from some of the world’s top newspapers including The Australian, The Financial Times, Los Angeles Times, The National Post, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal.
- Magazines: Hundreds of HD magazines like Better Homes & Gardens, The Economist, Esquire, Fast Company, Forbes, Game Informer, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Shape, TIME, Vanity Fair and WIRED, from publishers like American Media Inc., Condé Nast, Hearst, Meredith, TIME Inc., and more.
- Blogs: Your favorite blogs like Apartment Therapy, Colossal, Cool Hunting, Flavorpill, Saveur Daily, TMZ and The Verge.
- News sites: Leading news sites like ABC News, The Atlantic, CBS Sports, CNET, The Daily Beast, Huffington Post, The Guardian, NPR, Reuters, The Telegraph, and more.
If you’re after a video demo of what’s in store for you (pardon the pun), check out the YouTube video below:
We Australians (together with our friends in the UK and the US) will receive an update to change Play Magazines to Play Newsstand in coming days, and in other countries, the updated app will be available through the Play Store soon. In better news (or perhaps not, for users of Google Currents) it looks as if Currents subscriptions will be amalgamated into the Newsstand service, suggesting that Currents as a separate app might be not long for this world.
The put horribly anoying sliding pictures at the top of newsstand that waste nearly an inch of screen space and are so distracting that I simply cannot focus on reading anything, it’s completely ruined the app.
I’m kind of annoyed that a subscription to The Australian in Newsstand is $18 per month and the same seems to apply to all other News Limited publications that are there. That is absurdly expensive, and I already pay for a Digital Pass and this is not included in it.
Loving the update on the Currents side. Didn’t really lke the way the Currents app was set up. In Newstand, much much better! Looks better too.
Awesome I’ve had a weird bug with play magazines the last few months that Google support was unable to fix where it force closed on open and it seemed to be linked to my account as it happened on any device I tried it on, newsstand is actually working! Fingers crossed it still does
On the plus side Magazines app crashed 100% of the time on startup – this app only crashes every 5 minutes. Improvement!
On the minus side the most important features of currents are missing – hide read articles so if you don’t read an article the moment its posted you’ll never be able to scroll far enough to find it, and hiding sections of publications I won’t be interested in – eg fashion and style.
Also free vertical scrolling feels like a backward step for readability.
Oh and mark all read gone too
I already have the update and Ausdroid is no where to be found.
ausdroid are in there for me, podcasts and all.