The Google News & Weather app is one of those apps that doesn’t get a huge amount of airtime but it is actually a pretty good little app. Curating news from over 65,000 sources, it gives you one touch access to headlines, sports, financial and world news quick and easy. It is also pretty customizable to the content you are interested in seeing and this latest update, version 2.3 for those keeping score at home, brings one new feature that has been missing for a long time from the app: Push Notifications for important news events. As one who uses the app, it is a great new feature and for those who haven’t given it a go, it is certainly worth a look for your Android phone or tablet.
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The new notification feature is found in the settings of the Google News & Weather app. Use the hamburger menu to get to settings the tap the “Important news notifications” check box to enable them. Once you have the feature enabled, you will get push notification in your device’s in the Notification Tray like you do other notifications. The notifications are limited to big events (like
Google News & Weather
today for example I got a notification on the Iran Nuclear Agreement) so don’t expect baseball scores or something along those lines. Think big news items.
Along with these new push notifications, Google News & Weather has also a new suggested for you section which brings stories that may be of interest to you based on your reading within this app along with other information Google collects from your searching and reading on the web (via Chrome).
While the app could still use some improvements, Google News & Weather is an overall solid app. My biggest complaint is that when you open up an article to read, it drops you into Chrome to read it. Personally I’d prefer it stay in the app to read the article (ala Facebook like links) but really that’s not a big complaint in the grand scheme of things. Performance wise it is great which is a bigger deal.
Google News & Weather is available for both Android phones and tablets and like all the Google apps, is free.
