Microsoft Start

I read this every day but...it has issues. Sometimes you click on a story only for another story - the wrong story to appear. They will talk about a video but won’t include the link for it - which is rather annoying. If you click on the picture for the story it will sometimes include other random pictures. The “Good news” isn’t updated often enough - really? It’s that hard to find good things to report? And sometimes the “good news” is depressing. It’s just ok but better than most of the other stuff.

Title says it all. There’s too much clickbait for this to be a serious news app, and the news that isn’t clickbait is horribly curated by MSN. Google’s offerings somehow know exactly what articles I’d be interested in, and yet, although I’ve already fed Cortana and Bing a bunch of keywords for my interests and specified what topics to display, they still manage to come up with irrelevant articles. That being said, it does fit with the theme of fluent design, which I’m a fan of, and it is free, so the price is right. I just wish it was actually better at being a news app, and not another advertising hub. (That being said, it’s horrifying that Google has scraped so much info into my advertising ID, but this is a case where it’s actually kinda convenient, so, this is alright I guess.)

Microsoft News is fantastic for news. But the app never save settings about news preferences and even when you set them again, the categorization of articles is often poor. For example, I cannot find any possible way to permanently disable news about sports, entertainment and especially royals. When I finally do disable these (until the next time the app starts), the app saves that I’m logged in, but ignore my preferences. An because of poor categorization, things like sports, entertainment and royals ends up jammed under trending or possibly Asia or Africa. The result is, at least one in 3 articles I’m presented are tabloid rubbish. I can’t imagine that MS would need more than one person on duty at a time to properly sort and filter articles.

There's promise. I'd love to see more interests to choose from, many more sources and quicker additions of new news. I'd say the look and feel is a tiny bit sloppy next to hyper-polished Apple News, it's not bad at all but it is a lesser app imho. Font size, pic to headline ratio... it could be better. I'll use it tho... and then use the Reuters and Apple app until I feel this one provides everything. Or I'll drop it again like the last "effort". Man that got bad! Here's hoping MS actually allows the devs to make this app better quickly and effectively unlike so many other MS mobile programs. As someone who desperately misses live tiles I don't appreciate MS just giving up so many times.

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I am so, so upset about this radical redesign that MSN just did. I have three or four news apps that I check in with a few times a week, but this was the app that I would spend time on nearly twice a day. I loved its simplistic, clear-cut layout. This layout made it stand out from all other news apps. Now it’s ruined because of Microsoft who only took over because its its greedy, never-satisfied, and has a constant Need to monopolize wherever it can. I’m so saddened by this. I did not realize that my innocently pressing “update” would cause this to happen. I’m going to try to give it a chance, but something tells me I’ll be forced to delete it in a week. I can’t believe that Microsoft took over and ruined what used to be one of my favorite apps.