The News360 iPhone app is now as sleek as it is smart

Thanks to an update, the News360 iPhone app is now as sleek as it is smart

By Molly McHugh November 29, 2012

News aggregator apps are nearly a dime a dozen. They’ve all got social integrations and algorithms to spare, but only a handful of them really surface the stories you want and need to read. One of them is News360, which boasts layers upon layers of customization and user learning technology – but for all its smarts, the app hasn’t had as much style to offer across its various device interfaces.

Now the iPhone app is getting an upgrade that brings it up to the iPad app’s speed. The News360 iPad app got a big update this past summer making user source customization cleaner and more intuitive, and CEO Roman Karachinsky tells us it’s paid off. “Just looking at engagement and time spent in the app and how much people are reading with the new app … they increased so much,” he says. “Time spent increased closed to 50 percent, and the average session shows a reader going 11 swipes deep into the app, meaning our users are looking through hundreds of headlines.”

While the payoff has been obvious, he calls the former iPad app upgrade a risk. “It was sort of a gamble at first because we spent a long time perfecting our algorithms before launching News360 into the wild and seeing that people are using the app and that they are seeing it get smarter is amazing,” he tells me.
Now iPhone users will be able to access News360’s incredibly multilayered, learning algorithm with the new streamlined homescreen and single feed view. The biggest change is arguably the home feed, which keeps you from jumping from screen to screen to find all the stories News360 has surfaced for you. There’s also further customization options as well.

This interface is already available to Android tablets, but Android smartphones won’t get the new look for another month or so. The roadmap is focused on mobile, Karachinsky tells me, although he says News360 is thinking about redesigning its Web app as well. Mobile has absolutely become the medium for news consumption, a trend that sure isn’t slowing down anytime soon – 64 percent of tablet owners use the devices for news, as do 62 percent of smartphone users. This is going to be how we find and read news, so it’s important the apps working to create how we do this are as aesthetically appealing as they are intelligent.

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