Google released a new magazine and news-reading app for Android today designed to bring all your daily reads together into one piece of software. The new app, called Newsstand, features both magazines and newspapers, and you can add feeds from blogs and other websites as well. Google says as you use the app, it will learn what kinds of sources and stories you prefer and begin presenting a tailored experience.
The app is launching with full length (rather than summary or preview) content from newspapers like The New York Times, Wall Street Journal and The Financial Times, and magazines such as Vanity Fair and WIRED. Although stories from various publications will be presented side by side with each other, you can also import your existing magazine and newspaper subscriptions.
It's not Google's first effort at something like this, but it brings together many of the features of Play Magazines and Currents, Google's previous reading apps, into a single interface. (The former was essentially a magazine store and reading experience, while the latter was a Flipboard-style app that also gave a curated news experience from a variety of sources.) But unlike Currents, Newsstand has quite a few tools designed to let publishers better control their content. It supports paywalls, for example. Read a story from The New York Times, and it will count as one of your 15 free stories for the month, but also give you the opportunity to subscribe from within the app. Meanwhile, magazines show up when a new issue comes out, not on a story-by-story basis, and clicking on the cover image that comes up in the Newsstand feed will take you to a fully designed version of the magazine's app (if it has one) that runs inside Newsstand.
It also has features designed to help you drill down onto stories you care about. Google calls these topic tags. A story on the senate's hearing on Bitcoin, for example, might have a Bitcoin tag in the lower right corner. Click on it, and you'll get more Bitcoin-related stories. The more you dive into these, the more you will see over time. Google says it's also pulling in signals from outside of Newsstand, such as search queries and presumably what you're looking at if you're logged into the Chrome browser. Although it makes some use of location, the company says that's not a main focus for news delivery yet.
It's available today in the Play store.
Mat Honan is a senior writer for Wired's Gadget Lab and the co-founder of the Knight-Batten award-winning Longshot magazine.
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