Google News Reviews: Is It Legit?

Customer Experience

Positive experience18.6% of reviews
Neutral12.9% of reviews
Negative experience68.6% of reviews

~ Based on 792 written reviews from the US App Store.

What users say about Google News

Is Google News Safe?

Google News appears safe based on user ratings. AppsHunter Safety Score for Google News is 92/100.

This assessment is based on 226,194 user ratings, with an App Store average of 4.6/5.

Safety Analysis

90.2% of ratings point to a safe experience
4.8% of ratings suggest some concerns
5.0% of ratings point to a risky experience

~ Based on 226,194 App Store ratings for Google News.

Is Google News Legit?

Google News appears to be a legitimate app. AppsHunter Legitimacy Score for Google News is 100/100.

Based on 100 of 100 points across 7 verification signals from App Store and developer data.

Top reviews

Awful

No option to hide “types of stories”, not news sources. E.g. I’m tired of seeing stories like “someone got stabbed, killed, murdered”. Or the clickbait politics articles. Unless this is everything newsworthy what’s happening in the UK right now.

Update several (many) years later:
Nothing changed. What’s even worse - there’s been an earthquake in Panama and for some reason Google news doesn’t seem to care to pick this up. Speechless…

Just observing the type of aggregated news over the years one would think there’s a intentional algorithm which forces specific type of news to be displayed and certain information to remain hidden.
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Dark mode please!

And some ads break webpages throwing error

Nearly every article is paywalled

I guess one might find nice to be able to see all the headlines in one place but for me it is useless if you can’t read the articles even for publications I subscribed to.

You are better off skipping this app and just reading the full articles directly from the publisher rather than just the headlines here
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Unable to filter unwanted sources

Google has removed the ability to filter unwanted news providers like CBC and blocked the filtering of content. Now they are forcing you to see what they want you to see.

Notification issue!

YOUR NOTIFICATIONS ARE NOT SENDING. Please fix ASAP!!!

Not A2 compliance

Google News will not allow all A2 articles to be accessed when searched for or bookmarked for saved or later reading

Won’t stop giving me sports headlines

I’ve tried instructing the app repeatedly that I don’t want sports - I’ve told it to stop showing ESPN and other sports news outlets, I’ve told it to show me more of other things and less sports… but notifications continue to be dominated by sports coverage. I’ve turned off notifications and may also delete the app.
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Clickbait trash

The majority of the articles are clickbait behind paywalls. The app regularly freezes and they allow some of the articles to basically highjack your phone where you can’t back out from the paywall you hit. You have to close the app entirely and then start over. Also there’s no sort of popup blocking and I have had volume issues when I was in a quiet place and it suddenly plays some advertisements.

I get it that it’s all about money but damn this app
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Bias, ads, and other spam.

This app is trash. Very bias and controlled news stories, every few post is spam and even worse now random ads. Pure trash.

Crashes

When reading an article the app crashes if an app is unable for news it’s unreliable deserving a zero.

ipaper scam

I deleted this after several times the ipaper pop up locks the screen until you say yes to them, the only way to shut it down is to close the app and start again. If ipaper thinks this will get me to subscribe then they are too dumb to run a news paper as it has the opposite effect.

Very Poor

Compared to your Chromebook or web site versions, this is absolute rubbish.

Still good but

Pretty nice way to see multiple news stories in one place but it seems Google has removed the option to hide/block sources

Paywalls

Very frustrating when half the articles you select to read are paywalled. Do they really expect that I’m going to have 25 different subscriptions just to read the news? They have turned this into a ridiculously useless app.

Shoves right wing news down your throat

Used to be able to filter away bad faith news sources like Fox News. Now Google’s algorithm shoves right wing fascist news down your throat.

Why ?

Why install news on peoples phone that wanna charge us to view it ? Keep this bs to yourselves then

There is no audio

There needs to be audio on the apps so if you have a vision problem, you can hear it versus reading every It’s not a problem, but it should have audio built-in These app apps do not have audio built-in if someone can direct me to it I will be grateful

Locks up

I had to delete this app. After clicking on a New York Times article it locked up and kept trying to force me to enter my email and sign in to Google which I didn’t want to do. No back arrow or way to close the window. I think their only goal is to collect meta-data from you. Which I understand but when they decide to force it on you, that’s where I draw the line. Do not instal this app.
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No option to remove pay walled source

When it comes to social media and news there is apparently no money in allowing users to choose their own content and instead they choose deliver a never-ending stream of curated content. Google News doubles down on this and no longer allows me to remove pay walled sites or sources that I don’t like. The lack of control and choice is intentional and never going away.
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Most articles require paid access.

Most articles require paid access. Such a waste.