If you read indiscriminately from lots of different news sources, bad ones and good ones alike, and you have an iPhone and you do most of your reading on it, this might be useful. But I rarely read news stories which appear in 100 different news outlets, to begin with—they're usually articles which are only on the New York Times: book reviews, commentaries, original data analysis, investigative reporting. The stories that do appear in a few different places are usually syndicated, anyway, from AP or Reuters, so they're virtually identical. Particle appears to be sorting news article groups according to how many different times an event is being reported on, in different news outlets, which to me is the opposite way I want my news sorted. Besides that, I'm fairly picky about where I get my news: I subscribe to certain papers because they've developed good reputations for journalistic integrity, they've won Pulitzer Prizes, and they employ fact checkers. I avoid news sources that don't meet these criteria. Particle seems to lump them all together. Rather than de-noising news, "by using AI to help people understand more, faster," it appears to be introducing noise where there need not be any.
Amazing app! It’s so close to “the one” news app I’ve always been trying to find. The section on coverage from across the political spectrum and what’s the difference really helps get a more balanced view of any news. Love that you give summaries that can be clicked and we see the quoted section from different articles!
One improvement would be to show less domestic US news to people from other countries, and more news sources of their own local languages. I think all “international” news apps suffer from this. I keep trying to tune down domestic topics from the US, but still have so much of it on the app, that it becomes a chore over just using a different regional news app
We have a homepage redesign coming in the next month that should make the experience significantly better. For a long time the web site was just a stopgap—glad to finally be giving it some love. Stay tuned!
I wanted to like Particle, but the current user experience is frustrating. The information density is extremely low even on my giant phone (https://imgur.com/a/p6JQCYO), every 10 stories or so it interrupts the flow with "Help us find stories you want to see" CTAs (https://imgur.com/a/y8VVgqC) even though I've already done that twice, and it keeps shoveling sports content at me even though I've completely turned off sports (https://imgur.com/a/MYYZFJ7). I wish the team well, and I'll keep it on my phone and hope the UX improves.
I downloaded and I love the concept and the design. I’ll be watching closely and sharing this with my friends! Could use a tiny bit of that final 5% of finishing touches but I love it anyway. Also, I appreciate how good of a first-class iOS citizen it is!
Great news app. Not only does it learn which news you'd like to follow, its AI feature is actaully useful for a change (for me at least); it extracts the data you want to know about and it has a few useful views such as the "opposite views" primpt that I really like using to learn from both sides.
Related articles are great to reduce duplicates and being able to ask questions or seeing questions from other users was great to see.
Interesting as I've never been able to find one good source - Consumer of news and podcasts around 10 hours a day here - Some comments - USA centric to the core, in app font size control/colors, much bigger buttons everywhere, AI voice much deeper controls - Cheers and thanks for sharing.
The backend system that drives the app has many potential B2B applications that we expect to support keeping a totally free or freemium model for the app.
the link is apps.apple.com. In other words, this some app on the on the app store. Not made by Apple, just an app.
This is somewhat misleading as at first glance I took this as being a Apple product. This misdirection, intentional or not, is a big negative for me. So many products, corporations, companies try to gain every advantage by any means, that I now assume they cannot stand on their merits. That is just my experience though.
One improvement would be to show less domestic US news to people from other countries, and more news sources of their own local languages. I think all “international” news apps suffer from this. I keep trying to tune down domestic topics from the US, but still have so much of it on the app, that it becomes a chore over just using a different regional news app
The web will improve.
Related articles are great to reduce duplicates and being able to ask questions or seeing questions from other users was great to see.
edit: and also, do you think that's healthy??
My RSS reader collects no personal data, thank you very much.
Yesterday we added India, Canada, and UK. More soon.
Yesterday we added India, Canada, and UK. More will come soon.
Edit: Marcel is adding Australian news sources this morning and we are looking into launching
Uh how will it make money?
This is somewhat misleading as at first glance I took this as being a Apple product. This misdirection, intentional or not, is a big negative for me. So many products, corporations, companies try to gain every advantage by any means, that I now assume they cannot stand on their merits. That is just my experience though.