India.com, the digital media joint venture between Penske Media Corp and the Essel (Zee) group, has launched an Android app called Newsbuddy: India News Trending. According to the company, the news aggregating app is launched with millennials in mind, giving it a colourful interface. On installation, after a brief introduction, the app takes the user straight to trending news. Users can flip through these stories, or read them in full by tapping on full story. Tapping an icon on the top left, displays a list of categories for browsing. Each category is displayed in a different colour (background and all), although we feel a little toning down of the colors would probably make it more appealing. All articles seem to be sourced from India.com, and we didn’t see any articles from BGR, Bollywoodlife, TheHealthSite, or its other properties. The app also has a discovery assistant, which pops up a message suggesting a video to watch or article to read. However, we found this assistant offered pretty irrelevant information. When reading the tech section, the discovery feature popped up a suggestion to watch a viral video called ‘Radhika Apte shows how pregnancy is not a barrier for a career woman’. The discovery feature might get better the more the app is used. Other features include saving articles for offline reading, the ability to turn on and off notifications for each category and share articles on social media. The app is hard to recommend given the colourful backgrounds are not really comfortable to read in.…
