Google releases Currents news reader app for iOS and Android

Google just released its Currents app, a Flipboard-like app that takes your Google Reader feeds or your Google-offered news sources and packages them in a magazine-looking reader app. There are trending stories and naturally ways of spamming sharing stories (“magazines”) with others. As with most things Google offers, the app is free.

I wouldn’t exactly recommend picking it up, though. First off, the app is only available in the US. Seriously, Google? A news reader app? That has to be the absolute stupidest app ever to be restricted to a single country. Getting around that is of course easy if you’re on Android – just Google for the .apk – though you need a US account on iOS. Don’t bother, though, as the app is also way too slow to be anywhere half near usable. It started doing…whatever it is doing to my RSS feeds from Reader some time before I started writing this and I think it’s still going. iOS is full of these kinds of apps (Android…not so much) and they all manage to make the content pretty quickly enough that it doesn’t become a burden when you want to get on with reading. I might also have missed something, but I can’t find any way to see all my Reader feeds in one “magazine”, which is ridiculous as well, as I don’t care where stories are from and certainly isn’t going to manually browse dozens of feeds.

All in all, a big thumbs down to this latest app from Google. I started the year by liking Google a lot, but now that has turned into strong dislike. The recent forced changes to Google Reader and Gmail, changes to search pages, mobile/classic view systems that don’t work, and now releasing garbage like this makes me wonder if Google has simply lost it. Either way, if you’re on iOS, just get Flipboard. If you’re on Android….contact Flipboard and ask for an Android version?

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