I finally made Google News useful by ignoring half of it
Android Police 2026-06-25 10:00:13
Context: The author, Jon Gilbert, a Features Writer for Android Police, shares his experience of customizing the Google News app to make it a useful tool for staying updated on current events. He achieves this by ignoring half of the app's features and focusing on specific sections. By doing so, he is able to effectively use Google News as a companion app.
Key Facts
- The Google News app has a "For You" page that is divided into two distinct parts: "Top Stories" and "Picks for You", with the former showing the biggest news stories in the user's area and the latter featuring articles that Google thinks the user will be interested in.
- To curate the Google News feed, the author regularly taps the three-dot button and selects "Fewer stories about a topic" to tell the app what he's not interested in, which helps the app learn his preferences over time.
- The author primarily uses the "Following" tab to collate articles from his favorite publications, as it allows him to add search terms as topics and see articles from sources he follows.
- Google News does not perform well with specialized topics, as it takes a too-broad approach, and the author instead uses a dedicated RSS feed from specialized publications to stay updated on specific topics like Android news.
- The author recommends pairing Google News with an RSS reader and disabling Google Discover, which takes an even broader approach to recommendations and cannot be tuned in the same way as Google News.