Facebook News appeared first in the UK earlier this year and now expanding to other countries. Now it seems to start a gradual rollout to Android users in Germany.
This tab contains news posts from "pre-selected" sources. Users can set notifications, hide sources or posts that they don't like and save those they do.
The news section appears in the nav drawer grid for now and not as one of the top navigation tabs.
How to test:
- Tap on the hamburger menu to open the nav drawer.
- Tap on the News tail if available.
- Scroll down to see news.
Issues:
Overall, this feature looks rather like an early A/B test rather than a proper rollout.
- The worst part is that users can't configure the language on which they want to read the news. This makes it literally unusable to lots of ex-pats for example.
- Topic filter doesn't work yet showing that you already read all the posts. So you would need to browse through the main feed with lots of noise posts.
- Sources selection mostly consists of tabloids with which Facebook had a deal. So, the "selection" is simply a pick of top news websites plus several niche publications.
- Relevance of such news is super low. Lot's of local news publishers are present there while most of them are not related to your location. Would you read a local newspaper about some other city where you've never been?
Tester Context:
- 📲 Facebook is a well-known social media app that also owns Instagram and WhatsApp.
- 📲 Facebook is available in Beta and you can opt-in as a tester via Google Play. The beta program is getting full quite often but Facebook devs are extending it from time to time.
Facebook - Apps on Google Play
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