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May 30 Update. After many months I decided to try Google News again. Still the same huge distracting graphics. Still the limited feeds that lean far left. So many other reviewers say the same thing yet the amateurish graphics dominate still. Deleting this again. Not worth my time in this format. I’ll try again with high hopes in six months or so. I want so much to like this app! The new Google News is just plain horrible. The amateurish look is something a high school kid would create, full of big pictures and missing the ability to quickly scroll through headlines to find articles of interest without those glaring pictures distracting you until you just give up. Gone is the ability to use keywords of your choice to create a news tab, you can only choose from their limited lists. Google News now has the look of those webpages that are full of sensational gossip articles rather than raw news. Please bring back the old version.

The new version of this app is an enormous dissappointment. It now serves me huge swaths of visual (and oh great, moving) panels of news that are hardly relevant to me are difficult and sometimes obnoxious to scan. I don’t even understand how to train the algorithm to do a better job, because the only customization I can find when, for instance, I am served sensationalized local news stories picked up by the networks, is to eliminate the entire network as a news source, which is absurd. My old customizations are gone. This has gone from a smart, fast way to absorb a lot of information to a dumb, flashy slog which I continue to open out of habit but am now abandoning. It looks better and more immersive, but contains significantly less substance and value. Also, I hope Google is getting a cut of all the paywalls this app crashes you into now. No idea how this could come from a company that theoretically knows more about my web and news habits, whether I like it or not, than any other.

This new format makes you wade through multiple versions of the same news story. In the older format, you could choose to look at expanded coverage if you wanted to. This is just tedious scrolling—and fewer actual stories. Am I missing a way to collapse the coverage to one report for each news story? —with the option to look at other coverage if I chose to do so? I couldn’t see any way to collapse these repetitious listing. It should be up to the user to customize how the articles are presented. I loved the old Google news. This is dumb. One more thing: when I look at the 69,000+ reviews, I see that the average rating is 4.5 stars. Yet, when I scroll through the recent reviews, at least half, maybe more, give it very few stars. Are the 69K reviews including your past versions of Google News which was much better? Something’s wrong here... And one additional note: today I clicked on a story from the WSJ, but was unable to read it because I don’t have a WSJ subscription. It would make sense to tell users “subscription required to read article” before sending them on a wasted digital trip. Or better yet, don’t include links to articles that the general public can’t access. I have to agree with other reviewers that this is a form of click bait that benefits the publishers of the WSJ, not the dupes on Google News whose time is wasted.