5 Useful Apple Watch Apps For Keeping Up With The News
One of the biggest advantages of having an Apple Watch is the immediacy with which you can receive and check push notifications that you may not see right away if you're not looking at your iPhone. This makes the Apple Watch great for receiving text messages, personal reminders, and notices from smart home devices such as a video doorbell. It's also great for news alerts, which, by their very nature, are often urgent and important. By having a news app on your smartwatch, you can make sure that you'll constantly be in the know when a big story breaks.
News apps on the Apple Watch can also make reading the news easier. While you may not get the same in-depth stories on your watch that you otherwise would from some of the best free news apps for your smartphone, many apps offer a digest of top stories you can easily peruse on your Apple Watch. This will give you a rough idea of current events, with the best apps allowing you to save a story to read on your phone or tablet later, open it on your device automatically, or even let you read the entire story straight from your wrist. Based on (quite literally) hands-on experience, here are five useful Apple Watch apps for keeping up with the news. A more in-depth explanation of how these apps were selected for this list is available at the end of the article.
AP News
The Associated Press is a nonprofit agency that has been providing news reports to media outlets around the globe for nearly 180 years. In addition to conducting trusted election counts and polls and publishing its own Stylebook, the AP has earned 58 Pulitzer Prizes since the award was established and is one of the most trusted news sources in the world. It shouldn't be a surprise that its Apple Watch app is one of the most useful news apps available for the device.
The AP News app, which is available for the iPhone or iPad, offers breaking headline stories directly from the source and includes global, national, and local events. As an added bonus, you can also curate a feed of developing stories based on specific topics you're interested in. The Apple Watch app will present you, carousel-style, the top five stories of the moment and include their headlines, thumbnails, and bylines. You can scroll through and get a quick heads up of the day's biggest events, as well as use the Save button to read the stories later. Since you're getting more of a bird's-eye view of the news, rather than the full stories you would on the iPhone or iPad app, it would be nice if you could scroll through more than five stories, however. Besides that limitation, though, the AP News app for the Apple Watch will help you easily keep up with the most important current events.
Apple News
Apple has put a lot of effort into its News app since its 2015 debut, making it a core part of Apple's app ecosystem, along with music and podcasts. In addition to aggregating free news stories from major and boutique media outlets, it emphasizes trustworthy news sources. It employs a team of editors to help curate what you see on the app — which is further personalized by your preferences. Apple also introduced the ability to subscribe to your favorite magazines directly through the app, and you can get even more out of the Apple News app by paying for Apple News+, either by subscribing to it or bundling it with other Apple services. However, Apple News is unfortunately still not available in all countries or regions, so its usefulness may depend on where you live.
However, if Apple News is available to you, you should take advantage of its Apple Watch app. The News app for Apple Watch allows you to scroll through five current top stories from various sources, such as CBS News or The Washington Post. While you won't be able to read full articles, you'll get a good idea of what's happening as each story provides a headline, thumbnail, and source and a paragraph or two summarizing the event. You'll also be able to save the story for later with a single tap and receive push notifications (if you want) as more news breaks.
TuneIn Radio
Not everyone prefers to read the news. There are plenty of people — especially commuters — who only get their news through the radio, listening to the day's events rather than reading about them or watching the news. TuneIn Radio is one of the best Apple CarPlay radio apps, so it shouldn't be a surprise that it's also a great Apple Watch app. TuneIn Radio will let you easily control your audio news intake from your wrist if you're not driving to work but instead riding the bus or train.
The app allows you to stream over 100,000 radio channels from around the world, including local AM/FM stations. With so many choices, you can choose from nearly any kind of live newsfeed, including sports, traffic, and weather. With the Apple Watch app, you can quickly pause and play audio, as well as control volume — an especially useful feature if you like to take in your news during workouts. The Apple Watch app also keeps a playlist of your recent channels, allowing you to switch back and forth between them with a tap of your finger.
Since it's a radio app and not specifically a news app, you won't be able to receive push notifications if a big story breaks, which is something offered by many news apps like Apple News, NPR, The New York Times, etc. You also won't get to pick and choose which news stories you'd like to hear about — you'll be at the whim of whichever news radio station you choose to listen to.
Flipboard has been a popular news aggregator for years, thanks partly to its intuitive flip animation that lets you easily slide through news stories on your iPhone. With the paired Apple Watch app, perusing through the day's stories is made even more convenient. Straight from your wrist, you'll be able to scroll through ten top stories, identified by a clean UI that gives you the headline and thumbnail for each, as well as the topic (e.g., Genetics) at the top of the display.
Flipboard offers countless articles from thousands of local and national sources, including business, tech, cooking, travel, sports, and health stories. Both current events and long-form stories are available, and you can personalize your experience with For You and Topic feeds. Flipboard includes social elements, like connecting your Mastodon feed and offering community-made magazines. One drawback to Flipboard is that, several years ago, it exposed its user's data in a nasty, prolonged data breach, leaving the nagging question of whether the company's security team could let that happen again.
Citizen
If you're less interested in global politics and more interested in real-time information about your specific neighborhood, Citizen is an app that will provide you with the hyperlocal news you need. Working as a digital neighborhood watch, when incidents occur in your area, information is provided by people nearby or monitoring emergency scanners. If you're also close enough, the app will prompt you to provide a video of the scene if you can. If you hear sirens and helicopters around your home and want to know the cause, Citizen can be the fastest way to find out, with neighbors livestreaming the event from various angles. The app can be extremely useful in the event of a natural disaster or other dangerous event. I once received detailed information about a major terrorist attack that occurred across the street from me nearly an hour before any verified news source reported it even happening.
The Apple Watch app makes the immediate news offered by Citizen even more immediate by sending push alerts to your wrist as soon as an event nearby is reported. You can also set locations you'd like to monitor, such as a loved one's house or your child's school, in addition to your own proximity. A note of caution, however: since the app is emergency-focused and reports news before it can even be verified, you have to make sure it doesn't make you paranoid and induce unwarranted panic that your neighborhood is filled with nothing but dangerous crime.
How these Apple Watch apps were selected
As both a news junkie and someone who uses my Apple Watch for pretty much everything, I'm no stranger to news apps on my smartwatch. The five apps selected for this list have all been thoroughly tested by me. In some cases, I've used them consistently for several years and have become well-acquainted with the convenient advantages and disappointing flaws they have to offer.
Another factor that went into compiling this list was ensuring a diverse range of news apps available for Apple Watch. In addition to including the official app of an established news source like the Associated Press, this list also includes device-centric news aggregators like Apple News and Flipboard. Since many prefer to listen to the news rather than read it, efforts were made to find at least one news radio app worthy of this list. Finally, Citizen was also included due to its hyperlocal, real-time type of news that most other news apps cannot or do not provide. Together, this list offers five useful Apple Watch apps that allow you to keep up with the news and do so in different ways to best suit your preferences and needs.