Get your news with Veooz (app review)

Veooz is a Flipboard-esque app that want to be your new news reader. It brings a few unique features to the table. Will it be enough to stand out among the hundreds of other news apps that are on the market already? Read on.

Veooz overview

If you’re familiar with Android’s design language in KitKat, then Veooz’s interface will be pretty easy to use. It doesn’t incorporate Lollipop’s material design, but I don’t feel that it’s needed with this app.

It’s pretty easy to get started. When you first open the app it will walk you through a tutorial and will give you the option to select from topics that interest you. Unfortunately, you can only select from the topics that they suggest, but they do have most topics that you could think of…

The app feels very similar to Flipboard. You flip up through the articles like Flipboard, but without the flipping animation.

Veooz has a unique feature called “360” that will pull up related articles that can potentially offer alternative viewpoints. I found this to be handy especially in regards to political articles where opposing viewpoints are important. It was also handy in pulling up other articles that could offer more information not covered by the original.

Once you’ve clicked the 360 icon, you can also select buzz from the menu at the top. That will allow you to read trending tweets that relate to the article.

Another feature that is nice is the local news option. All you have to do is select the local option in the left menu and select your city. If your city does not show up, you may need to try another larger city in the vicinity. Smaller cities didn’t show up the feed. The developer may want to consider adding a feature where the closest local feed would show up instead of nothing.

Other features that I liked were the ability to open images and videos within the app independently of the article and the option to read the text of the article only without ads taking up precious screen real estate.

The one complaint that I have about Veooz is that you are unable to add your own sources. Some sort of pseudo-RSS support would be a great feature to add and would take care of my complaint.

Veooz setup

There isn’t much to setup other than installing it from Google Play and selecting your topics and local news feed.

Who will enjoy Veooz

If you enjoy reading the news, then this app will work good for you. There are some great features that make reading and discovering the news an easy proposition. However, if you want to read news from specific sites, then you’ll want to look at a dedicated RSS reader.

What we liked:

• 360 feature
• Text only option
• Local news

What could be better:

• RSS support
• Better local news search

Veooz summary

Overall this is a nice app. I think that if I hadn’t already discovered the wonderful world of RSS feeds, then I would use this app much more. I think this app works better as a news discovery option, but for others who have certain sites that they prefer, then they may want to stick with a dedicated RSS reader and use Veooz as way of finding new sites that you might want to follow.

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