A few months after debuting on iOS, Vu has made its way to Android. The personalized news curation app offers a thoughtful list of content from various sources, encouraging users upon opening to like or dislike various articles. This facilitates a learning algorithm that, in time, promotes content that you should want to read.
While it’s not imperative to sign up for the service, doing so allows the app to remember your activity and provide more comprehensive recommendations. It’s a novel approach that takes on incumbents like News360 and, to some extent, Zite and Flipboard, but does so with a workflow that’s extremely fun to use.
There are 100s of sources already available to swipe through upon launch, divided into category for easy perusal, but Vu encourages users to create their own “Vu’s”, which amount to sub-categories containing content from publishers selected by you. It’s not quite an RSS reader, as you don’t seem to be able to add specific feeds, but there are more than enough to meet all most users’ needs.
Reading an article reminds us of Google Currents, as Vu takes advantage of Android’s swipe-friendly horizontal navigation. Once inside an article, you can like or dislike it, share it using a custom sharing menu, attaching little comments or reactions of your own.
In terms of design, Vu takes cues from Google’s latest set of apps, using a left-side sliding menu to access specific categories. It performs extremely well, too, and comes with extensive tablet support for 7- and 10-inch devices. The most recent update, for example, added dual-pane support for the new Nexus 7.
[source]Google Play[/source]
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