Microsoft Takes News App Fight to Apple's Turf: News Pro App Impressions

Microsoft Corporation

released a news aggregator app yesterday called News Pro on iOS and web. The release sees Microsoft competing directly with Apple Inc.

in the increasingly crowded field of iOS news reader apps. The app sells itself as a "hyper-relevant" news aggregator that culls users' skills and interests from LinkedIn or Facebook, theoretically offering news that's tailored to the users's needs. In execution, however, News Pro has a little trouble identifying users' work experience and interests. It's important to note that News Pro is not a mainline Microsoft product in its first iteration. It comes from Microsoft Garage, an internal experimental projects outfit. The News Pro app itself is a disappointment as far as Microsoft products go. It has none of the slick feel or responsive functionality that Microsoft services and devices like Windows 10 and the Xbox One have made standard. The web app feels lean, even compared to the minimal UIs Microsoft has favored in recent years. Two tabs sit atop the screen next to a simple "N" logo: "Home" and "Explore." "Home" is the news feed, and it feels like a beta. The feed is broken down into two sections: "Highlights," a selection of eight stories that News Pro thinks are most important to the user, and "more articles," a mass of headlines that stretches off to the ends of the internet. The feed gives the impression of an information dump. Articles aren't organized by publication or topic in the feed, so stories about a journalism student going to a conference from a small-town Michigan newspaper appeared next to analysis of Morgan Stanley

's latest Barclays PLC (ADR)

note in this reviewer's feed. Microsoft will want to fine-tune the app's curation algorithm. The "Explore" displays topics and sources News Pro recommends the user follow. News Pro's analysis of the reviewer's interests was opaque. This reviewer's LinkedIn lists skills like publishing, writing and editing, and blogging. From those skills and interests, News Pro suggested the reviewer follow industries such as "wholesale" and "professional training and coaching," which felt like a mismatch. Once the reviewer manually followed a bunch of news organizations and writing topics, News Pro began feeding them more relevant options. The web app's user experience feels clunky. The cursor doesn't change to a hand on mousing over a headline, but users must click headlines to go to the article. Only some articles open in the reader view, and others open new tabs directly to the piece, which somewhat defeats the purpose of an aggregator. Additionally, the app has some stability issues. Some articles load slowly even in the reader view, and occasionally the reader display stays blank. News Pro doesn't compete with Apple News in terms of functionality or ease of use. Apple News walks the user through selecting topics, while the user has to fight News Pro a bit to get the right content into the feed. Apple News also offers a robust set of features that News Pro doesn't yet, like a search function and the ability to save links for later viewing. Conspicuously, News Pro is only available on Apple phones and not Android or Microsoft's own Windows 10 phone mobile platform. It will be interesting to see what value Microsoft sees in competing with Apple on its home turf, especially with a product that doesn't stack up to Apple News. Benzinga has reached out to Microsoft for comment and had not received a response at time of writing.