Yahoo News Digest brings summarized news to Android

Back in 2013, Yahoo bought news aggregation app Summly along with its back-end services for a cool $30 million. It seemed as if the company, and its then 17-year-old founder, got swallowed up into the Yahoo machine, neither to be heard of again. That was until this January, when Yahoo released Yahoo News Digest for iOS, based on the technology it acquired from Summly.

Following the iOS release, Yahoo has been busy working on an Android version. The good news (pun intended) is that Yahoo has now released the Android version, and it’s free to download from the Google Play Store.

There are a plethora of news apps available for Android, many of which come from the top news agencies like Reuters, AP, and the BBC. There are also popular apps like Google Newsstand and Flipboard. So, what does Yahoo News Digest bring to the table? As the “digest” part of its name implies, Yahoo News Digest is all about getting a summary of the news and freeing the reader from news overload.

Yahoo News Digest provides a digest of the top news stories for a variety of topics including Business, Technology, and World News. Mimicking people’s traditional news consumption pattern, the digests are delivered twice a day – once in the morning and once in the evening.

Using some fancy algorithms, each story is created from multiple sources to present the essential information. Each story is made up of “Atoms”, which include things like quotes, images, videos, maps, infographics, and Wikipedia excerpts.

The app can be configured for different international markets, so that the digest is delivered at the right time and with stories that are relevant to the reader. At the moment, currently supported countries are the USA, Canada, and the United Kingdom. If you don’t live in one of those countries, Yahoo also provides an International edition.

For those of you who suffer from the need to keep peeking at your news app, Yahoo News Digest could provide a cure for your insatiable desire for new stories. The app only updates twice a day, so there is no point in constantly opening it to see if anything new happened. The news items are presented in an attractive format that is quick to read, and only a few minutes are needed to remain informed about what is going on in the world.