Google News Regional App on Android Market

A new app has popped up on Android Market, Google News Regional. This app is somewhat limited, as you are still using the browser to see the news, but it can auto detect your location, and lets you easily jump between categories. You can also change the location manually if you’d like to see news from other regions. So is it any good?


This is not an official Google app, it is an outside developer. The app uses the language set in the phone plus the coarse position of the user to choose your location, mine immediately went to U.S.A. I thought I might be able to set it to a more precise location than that, but it is only at the country level it seems.

Some minuses for this app are that you can’t refresh from the menu, and it doesn’t seem to automatically refresh. Also, there are ads at the bottom of the page. One of the commenters asked the developer to “please remove the Zombie ad now”, so it seems some of the ads might be a bit questionable. The app is free, but honestly, it isn’t that different from just accessing Google News from your browser, I guess it saves you a few seconds because you just click on the app to open to news, but that doesn’t seem very valuable. This doesn’t look like a keeper to me.

Let us know what you think. You can check out the app on the Android Marketplace here.