Here is what is wrong with the new Microsoft News app
Microsoft launched an updated news application called Microsoft News for Google Android and Apple iOS devices today.
The company revealed that it has "completed redesigned" the application "into a modern and beautiful experience". The update introduces a dark theme, options to configure breaking news alerts, new personalization options, and a new continued reading experience.
Existing users should receive an update in the coming days or weeks while new users can download and install the applications from the official store.
When you launch Microsoft News for the first time after installation you are walked through a series of customization screens. You may sign in to a Microsoft Account to sync settings between devices (but can skip that, good), and may pick interests from a large number of generic topics such as celebrity news, soccer, technology, or politics.
Once you are done, you are taken to the main interface where the first set of news articles is displayed to you.
Some things have definitely improved; headline text is now larger which is a good thing obviously, and if you prefer dark interfaces, you may switch to the dark theme in the settings to do so.
The first issue that you may run into is that you may not get news in your language depending on where you are located in the World. A tap on the location button and the selection of "detect my location" or "search location" did not work for me as Microsoft News came up with zero content based on the location.
You can switch to a different localized version of Microsoft News, however. Tap on the settings icon, then on edition on the page that opens and pick a location from the available ones. Picking Germany, for example, switched the interface to the German edition.
You get the usual assortment of articles from integrated newspapers and news organizations only in Microsoft News. Microsoft News lacks options to customize news sources or filter sources. If you don't want news from a certain news source you are out of luck as you cannot block any using the application.
Another issue that is apparent right away is that advertisement looks exactly like regular news pieces. The only difference is that Microsoft News displays a sponsored tag next to the advertisement's image to indicate that it is sponsored.
Depending on where you live, you may also notice a huge increase in clickbait in all news sections. Clickbait would not be that bad if you could block certain news sources but since there is no option to do that, you can only ignore it. There is also no option to select "show more" or "show less" which would be quite the useful option as well.
The interface uses a somewhat strange design for news articles. Microsoft News displays articles in different formats; small and big, vertically or horizontally stretched, with and without images. It is quite difficult to go through the list of news quickly because of that layout. I wish the app had an option to display only news titles in a list format but that is missing.
The number of articles per page has decreased. Microsoft News displays three or four articles per page without scrolling only, a reduction from the six or so articles that the old version displayed.
Many of the issues described in the article are not unique to Microsoft News. Google launched a Google News update recently and it did not sit well with users as well.
Now You: Do you use a news application or service? Any that provides just headlines and offers customization options?
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.