Sunday, August 05, 2018

Android Google News update - Failure!

Google and their minions may think they know better than most of us, but, at times they do fail.  This failure in my less-than-humble opinion is the update to their 'Google News' app.  The version before was stable (never crashed for me) and allowed me to quickly and easily view news and update my selected sources for offline viewing.  I liked it as I could pull articles for reading on the bus to work.

The latest version isn't as friendly or works well.  It regularly crashes and at times several times in a row.  I had reported it each time, but, it feels they are going into a black hole as nothing has changed.  At times it stalls and gets application not responding, or, rarely it just shuts down.  I have just stopped telling them as I don't see any fixes when they do updates.  That may not be fair, but, it has been a couple of months and when I do feedback I point out the issues that are part of this blog.

The 'for you' and 'headlines' interface really needs to be looked at and fixed.  I am scrolling through the list of articles and it refreshes and takes me back up to the top.  If I am viewing the list it should just stop updates and use an indicator at the top flagging there are updates.  Tap the indicator and it updates the articles.  It is extremely annoying that I get pages down and it refreshes and when I scroll down to find that one article it isn't there any more.

The favourites section isn't all that bad, but, bad choices Google made for their interface on my sources makes it a pain to use.  The version before allowed me to refresh all of my sources I have flagged for downloading.  This one does not.  I don't know if it is supposed to automatically update, but, it does not.  If I don't go into each one and 'pull down' the list to for updating it won't download the articles.  It is a major pain each day as I have 25 sources for downloading.  I like being able to read articles offline on the bus and at work (we don't have public wi-fi where I work).  When they do fix this issue it would be nice if they allow us to pick the number of articles to be downloaded and the number of days.  Not all of us have unlimited internet and while I have a large data cap it would be nice to limit what this app downloads.

Visually it is nice, but, one more suggestion for Google.  How about allowing us to turn off images on the summary?  I am only interested in the text and if that interests me I will click on the article and then you can show me the pretty pictures.