Summly App Review: Looks Like Windows 8, But Still Great

The first time I opened Summly, I thought Nick D’Aloisio, the developer, was trying to put Windows 8 on my iPhone. That aside, Summly is beautiful, and a great way to find and read news.

Summly is a unique news app, instead of showing you full news articles Summly uses an algorithm to generate a 400 character summary. If you want a longer summary you double tap; and if you want the full article, you swipe down.

Articles are grouped into categories, such as Politics, World News and Technology; and each category has credible news sources you can choose from. If you want to share an article, you press and hold, and then you’ll be given the option to post a link to Twitter, Facebook, or email.

After a few minutes of using Summly, I found navigation to be pretty easy. Also, I noticed a few summaries had poor grammar, but I didn’t have trouble understanding them.

Where Summly fumbles, is its option to “add any topic, person or theme to receive summaries.” Summly would often crash after I added one, forcing me to reopen it, and try again. If it did work, I would often receive no summaries. However, I tried this feature again a few days later, and it did not crash, and I received many summaries. How well this feature works might depend on the Summly server traffic.

Summly is a great way to find a news from a variety of sources; however if you want news on a particular topic, person or theme, use Google.

What news app do you use? Click here you’d like to try Summly, its free. Then let us know what you think.

P.S. - Like our news? Support the site with a coffee/beer. Or shop with our Amazon link. We use affiliate links when possible--thank you for supporting independent media.