‘Microsoft News’ Launches for iOS as Rebranded MSN App

Microsoft’s MSN News app has officially been renamed to “Microsoft News” on iOS and Android, though the new branding won’t replace the decades-old MSN brand.

According to a new blog post from Microsoft, the refreshed platform will power all of its news content across its news apps on Android and iOS, as well as MSN on the web and the News app on Windows 10.

“Microsoft News is the new name for our news engine that powers familiar sites like MSN.com, and our newly redesigned Microsoft News app for iOS and Android,” explains Rob Bennett, editor-in-chief of Microsoft News. “Microsoft News also powers news on Microsoft Edge, the News app in Windows 10, Skype, Xbox, and Outlook.com.”

The highlights include a dark theme, integration with iOS and Android widgets, configurable breaking news alerts, and personalization tools that allow users to follow topics like World News, Fitness, Personal Finance, and more.

Microsoft will be curating news from more than 1,000 “premium publishers” and 3,000 brands with both human editors and artificial intelligence. Microsoft’s AI scans more than 100,000 pieces of content every day, and processes it to determine its topic, popularity, and freshness. Microsoft News uses more than 800 editors worldwide to curate the top stories each day and present them in this new mobile app, on MSN.com, and elsewhere.

“In just the past four years we’ve delivered more than $600 million [USD] back to our publishers, enabling them to focus on what they do best: quality journalism,” Bennett said. “Diversity, in our newsroom and in the publishers we partner with, is a key ingredient of the Microsoft News experience.”

“We carefully compose our pages every day to present multiple sides of a story and consciously curate a wide variety of opinion pieces so that our readers can explore issues via new and different perspectives. With that goal in mind, we’re always assessing our network of partners to ensure that we provide the most diverse, credible, and well-rounded content available.”

You can check out the refresh now at MSN.com, as well as the refreshed apps on Android and iOS.