Recently there was a Zen app for Android, which should smartly advise interesting content.
The main advantage of the Internet as a source of information is efficiency. Users can instantly publish some news on social networks, and the media will immediately pick it up, and after 10 minutes everyone will know about it. On TV and radio, there is also operational news, but it takes more time for news to come out on these sites. The Internet is also ahead of the rest of the media in terms of the number of sources: news sites, online publications, news agencies, social networks, blogs and much more.
However, first you need to find a means of obtaining information. On September 13, the service of recommending materials 'Yandex.Zen' appeared as a separate application for Android. The service itself has been operating for over a year as part of the Yandex Browser. The app looked very nice from the screenshots, so I decided to give it a try.
All I need from a news application is a convenient feed and reading mode, as well as normal recommendation algorithms. For some reason, not everyone can satisfy these three points, but these are the main functions of such programs.
Comfortable, beautiful and … everything
Appearance is perhaps the only plus of the Yandex news app. It looks nice, although it stands out from the Material Design style. Animations run smoothly and quickly. You can show the latest posts in the notification shade or place a nice widget on your desktop. There are no questions about the design.
But there are questions about the functionality of the application, there are many of them. It does not know how to adapt the text in a convenient way for reading, but simply opens the page in the built-in browser. Therefore, you cannot adjust the font, point size or any other parameters for easy reading. This is a big disadvantage for such an application.
But my biggest disappointment was the news feed. When you first start, Zen will ask you to select your favorite sources first. Allegedly, the news feed will be 'smart' based on this. But in the end, it turns out that I come across materials two or three days ago, sometimes even older, much older. I once came across the news for July. However, there is no way to sort posts by time or relevance. Why do I need a bunch of links, generated in a chaotic order – it's not clear.
I also have problems with recommendations. Algorithms for evaluating user tastes are based only on likes and dislikes for posts. You can also completely block a site you don't like. But I caught myself thinking that I do not read news and interesting articles, but simply block some dubious sites. And only after thoroughly cleaning the tape from all unnecessary, the application began to advise approximately what I would like to see. Although sometimes strange posts appear.
Perhaps the problem is that I do not use the rest of Yanedks' services, and the company was not able to collect information about my preferences, as Google does. So get ready to 'educate' the app.
What is the result
In fact, Yandex Zen is a beautiful feed with links. I did not find any advantages for myself in it over competitors, but there are many analogues. Therefore, I do not understand how it will be promoted. But it's enough to add a normal reading mode for texts in order to cut off all unnecessary information from web pages and improve the recommendation algorithms, otherwise you will come across news from two months ago. And even then it will be much better.
'Yandex.Zen' on Google Play
What newsreader do you use?