Particle: Personalized News

I have now been using this as my first go-to source for news updates nearly every morning for more than a month now. I like the summaries, and unbiased approach. These are great, but the game changer I hoped for was it’s touted ability to learn the types of stories and content I was most interested in. The first few days, this was simply not good even after using their tools to determine my interests. I thought I would just give it more time and see what it could do. My complaint is that it has only gotten nominally better, even after continued attempts to “train it”. This has huge potential, but is a bit frustrating that even after telling it I want all the news on certain subjects and none on others, it doesn’t seem to be listening. For example, my favorite sports team, or news from a specific region. I hope this can be approved. Hi hopes, but more work is needed.

I’m shockingly impressed by Particle. On my use of it I loved the layout and ease of use. Over the last month it’s moved from a buried folder to my Home Screen and has become my go to news app, despite being a subscriber to Apple News. I enjoy that the user can apportion the preferred amount of subject matter and that the app lets you train and refine what it feeds you in stories. I’ve noticed lately that it’s skewing heavily each time I open with a certain sports genre, and I’m interested to see if this is an effect of seasonality related to that specific sport that will change to a different sport or a different news subject altogether. In any case, I’m hooked, and I love the read out loud feature, which is great for a morning recap.

Between the UI, endless feed customization options, succinct overviews and political leaning scale, this app is exactly what I said in the title. I highly recommend spending the time and really fine tuning your content preferences. I took about 20 minutes deep diving into the hundreds, if not thousands, of options. Now, my feed gives me the latest on everything I wanna know about. To the developers, one thing I’d like to see that would really take this app to the next level is the author/outlet following feature. To follow them, I have to search specifically for them, click follow and then I don’t know where it goes from there. I’d like to see a “Following” page of sorts that only includes news from the people/outlets I follow. Maybe this page could serve a dual purpose between following and explore (where I could see recommendations of authors/outlets to follow based on those I already do). I think the page could live on the bottom navigation. Once there, I’d like to swipe side to side between following and explore. Just a thought. App is incredible otherwise.