I wanted to ditch Google News, but the alternatives made it worse

Google News is that one constant app that has stayed on my phone’s home screen forever. No matter how many phones — or even platforms — I’ve switched, it has somehow maintained its position every single time. While Twitter has often been the go-to platform for trending news, Google News has been the reliable, traditional news source that has remained steady and largely unchanged.

That’s perhaps one of its biggest downsides. Google News hasn’t undergone any significant transformation in several years. I’m greeted with the same layout and design I’ve been seeing for ages. That familiarity eventually became a turn-off, pushing me to look for alternatives and try out a bunch of similar apps on the Play Store. Ironically, that exercise only made my respect for Google News grow.

There are far too many apps on the Play Store from individual news outlets. I’ve always stayed clear of them because I don’t want to rely on a single channel for my daily news. I want a mix of sources and voices. Some outlets do tech better, others excel at world news, politics, or entertainment. And then there are a handful that do a decent job with local coverage of my city.

That’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve stuck with Google News so far. So when I went looking for alternatives, I was still very much looking for news aggregators. While that narrowed my search, most of the apps I tried felt like they were trying hard to be different — and failing miserably at it.

When I started my search, the internet kept pointing me toward SmartNews. People were generally raving about it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for me because it’s only available in two editions: the US and Japan. The same goes for Apple News. For someone in India, the search just continued.

I then landed on more conventional options like Microsoft’s MSN. I don’t know how else to put it, but it felt too Microsoft-y. It gave me the same ick I feel when using Microsoft Teams or Outlook — so much so that I uninstalled it within seconds of setting it up. I regret the moment I decided to download it in the first place.

Moving on, I tried Opera News. Honestly, it felt like one of the worthy alternatives to Google News. The content density was just right, and so were the news types and overall quality (which I presumed would get better over time). What it glaringly lacked, though, was support for local news from my own city. In a world where we no longer rely on newspapers, getting hyperlocal news has become incredibly difficult. And I value local coverage, at least for major developments. Opera News could have been the one I settled on, but this missing piece made me skip it, too.

I also experimented with a few apps that let you build your own news feed using RSS, like Feedly — there are plenty of such apps on the Play Store. The problem with all of them is outlet discovery. First, you have to dig up sources, find their RSS feeds, and set everything up yourself — a process that demands far too much patience.

Second, it’s everything from the RSS feed straight to your face, with no algorithmic input or personalization. Those are two things Google News has almost perfected.

After scouting the Play Store, seeing what the world has to offer, and playing around with what seemed promising, I came back to Google News.

What I’ve realized is that Google News’ biggest strength doesn’t lie in its algorithm, personalization, and aggregation. After going hands-on with so many alternatives, I can confidently say its most underrated feature is its boring predictability. The app sticks to its basics without the quirks others experiment with — and that actually works in its favor.

Call me a creature of habit, but Google News continues to fit well into my workflow. That’s probably why it has stayed on my home screen for so long. God knows I tried, but I still couldn’t find a news app that felt as comprehensive and as direct as Google News.

My return to Google News is less about will and more about the lack of better — or even comparable — alternatives. It still has its flaws, but I can live with them for now because I’ve now seen worse. Google could easily extend my stay by improving the areas where the app clearly lags.

For starters, Google News has a solid personalization algorithm, but it still gets things wrong. It often shows stories I don’t care about or keeps repeating a topic I clicked on once on a random morning and never returned to. Personalization needs to get a little more personal. It also wouldn’t hurt if the app spaced things out better instead of overwhelming you with too much information on a single screen.

And before I forget, I’ve been sorely missing AI integration inside Google News, especially knowing that it’s already making its way into almost every other Google service. I know Google added audio briefings a couple of months ago, but they’re once again region-locked, leaving me out of luck. For now, I rely on Gemini for my morning news fix, but I wish Google would bring audio briefings to a wider audience as a quick way to digest the day’s news.

For now, I’m sticking with Google News. But these changes could genuinely make me want to pick it over everything else. I just hope Google is listening.