Google News Learns Some Data-Saving Tricks

A few months back, Google overhauled its mobile news experience, deprecating the seldom-used Play Newsstand in favor of a new Google News app. More than just a simple Material Design 2 facelift, the app added Google's favorite AI sauce to personalize news selection and discovery. Now it's going back to its roots of making news available for everyone, including those with less than favorable Internet connections or less than capable smartphones.

Google's entire business runs on the Internet, from ads to services to devices. While it probably wishes good Internet connections were prevalent everywhere, it has to live in a world where things aren't as such. Fortunately, it is now taking steps to make sure its apps and services still work as much as they can under less than ideal conditions.

It's no News Go app, but Google News is being given some features to help save you some data usage. Perhaps the best one of them all is the ability to download articles for offline reading later. Of course, those have to be downloaded over a Wi-Fi connection, otherwise what would be the point.

There are other features too, like making Newscasts previews text-focused instead of using data-hogging images. When images are really necessary, they will be compressed and will take up less cache on the device. Videos and GIFs won't autoplay either. And when YouTube Go is installed, Google News will use that instead of the full YouTube app for even more data savings.

Google says that these core features will be available for those who are using a "lighter connection", though it doesn't specify what falls under that category. Android Go phones, of course, immediately make use of these.