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Article in App of the Week category.
River is a new take on the news feed
At the moment, there’s no issue finding news. It seems to surround us and is consumed en masse. We read the news, get alerts through…
At the moment, there’s no issue finding news. It seems to surround us and is consumed en masse. We read the news, get alerts through Twitter and Facebook, see it on TV, and share it with one another. River wants to be how you discover your news, that also keeps it unbiased, personalized, and private. And it looks great doing it with a uniquely-tailored UI.
Once I downloaded River for the first time, I was in love with the user interface. The app uses vivid gradients atop playing video for a very modern look. The app onboards new users by asking them to choose up to nine topics of interest that are fairly broad such as technology, football, or music.
Then you’re dropped right onto your own personalized feed. As you use River, this feed becomes more and more accurate as it learns what you’re in to. The feed is list of story topics that you can swipe up and down to navigate between. It is all too easy to sit back, flick through topics until one catches your eye. In another nice touch of UI, a video of the topic silently plays in the background which makes the news feel more alive than a static image.
Once you find a story that piques your interest, you can tap on it to read it from the source, or tap “more on this story” to see similar stories on the same topic from a variety of different sources. This is absolutely huge in remaining unbiased for the news. If you get your news from your Twitter feed, you’re unconsciously surrounding yourself with like-minded thinkers which doesn’t let you see other points of view.
These stories are also dead-simple to share. There is a share button just to the right that opens a slick menu-overlay from the bottom of the display where you can send it to your Insta stories, Twitter, Messages, and more.
If you feel your feed gets a bit stale, you can browse the news on your own. You can hit up the search tab where a list of trending topics is a good place to start. Or, if you’d rather, you can switch your focus to any number of different verticals. Just narrow down your focus to celebs, movies, MMA, or any of the other topics River exposes.
River is a fantastic way to stay current on the news, to remain open-minded to other points of view, and all from a slick app that is nothing like any other news app out there on the market. Best of all, it is entirely free to download and doesn’t require any private information to use.
But enough about other people's apps.
