This tendency has increased dramatically with the boom of smartphones and tablets, doing together to print news what email did to traditional “snail” mail years ago. However, while nowadays most people get their news via Facebook, Twitter and other similar online social networking services, these are more like “digested” or “summarized” news, which rarely elaborate or provide depth. If you use news readers though, you know that you can get and consume your news on your iPhone in a way that resembles the more “traditional” methods, providing you with much deeper and better news articles. The problem is that news reader apps tend to be paid apps (at least the good ones used to be), but it wasn’t until recently that some noteworthy, free alternatives became available for the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch. Let’s take a look at the two best of them.
What Exactly are News Feeds and Readers?
Despite every news site sporting its own Facebook and Twitter accounts, most, if not all relevant news channels still offer news feeds and RSS channels to which one can easily subscribe to using a service like Google Reader, which gathers all the news from the news’ sources that you like. Important Information: News feeds and RSS channels are streamlined versions of news created specifically for reader to subscribe using news reader services. If you have a Google account, you already have what you need to start subscribing to some RSS feeds. Head over to Google Reader to learn more.
2 Best News Readers for iOS
The first of these is Flipboard, a self-proclaimed “social magazine” that gathers all the best news from the web from among a series of topics that you specify and that also allows you to pull news from your Google Reader account, making it perhaps the most varied and versatile free news reader out there. Its interface is very simple and intuitive, with users needing only to “flip” through articles to scan across them. That said, it is not the most efficient reader due to its interface, since it doesn’t show as many news as other alternatives on one screen.
Feedly
Our other alternative is Feedly, a more recent contender in the news reader space that offers a more traditional interface, but keeping things still a bit fresh with some original navigations elements. Feedly also syncs with your Google Reader account, making it fairly easy to pull your news from Google’s service to read in the app. Navigation within the app is ok, although you might need to adjust some settings in order to tailor it to your liking.
Conclusions
In both cases these apps allow you to save articles for later reading either within the apps themselves or through popular read-later services like Instapaper and Pocket (which we compared in this article). This puts them on par even with paid news readers and makes them very important alternatives for anyone who likes to read news the way their writers intended. Make sure to check out both apps, since they offer very different experiences, which gives you even more to choose from. And best of all? You get all these choices at no cost! The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.
