Free mobile news app
SmartNews is a free tool that gathers news stories from third-party sources and delivers them to your smartphone. It locates and organizes articles, making it easy to find and learn about whatever interests you. The app makes it possible to read without an active Internet connection, boosting convenience.
Top trending news
Staying informed is essential, but nobody buys physical newspapers anymore. Instead, people rely on apps like Google News, NPR News, and The New York Times to learn about relevant events. SmartNews hopped on the bandwagon, too, bringing trending stories to people worldwide.
However, while legitimate, this app isn’t a publisher. Instead, it collects articles from 300 other publications, curating the stories into a single tool for you to explore from a unified interface. That way, you don’t have to download several programs to explore various topics.
Customizable usage
The interface is user-friendly and intuitive. Navigation options sit at the top of your screen, letting you swipe through various channels. Each represents a content category, which you can rearrange or edit to increase usability.
Enabling notifications lets the tool send pop-ups, ensuring you never miss a significant story. You’ll also find a social channel that connects with your Twitter account, enabling SmartNews to send popular stories to your timeline. While you can read in the regular web version, the smart mode is where the app showcases its capabilities. It loads the news instantly for offline viewing.
Notable issues
This app is free to use, but that means you’ll have to view ads quite often so that it stays afloat. The pop-ups wouldn’t be so questionable if SmartNews checked the reliability of its sources, though. It’s particularly problematic with political papers and tabloids. Plus, the UI looks slick, but it doesn’t load quickly. It often freezes and crashes while you’re reading, too.
Our take
Overall, SmartNews is a mediocre news app. Its interface is intuitive, the extra features are handy, but the execution is not good enough to make its functionalities really shine.
Should you download it?
No. Although it’s a convenient, free app, SmartNews does not filter its stories to get you only the most trusted sources. Plus, the bugs are not really worth the trouble. It needs a lot of improvements and fixes.
