“Been my news app of choice for several years now. — SmartNews has a good clean UI, not nearly as many ads as its competitors do and is generally pretty fast and reliable. It’s a lot like Google News but with more sources and a wider…”
Independent automated assessment · 3 signal sources · 562 reviews scanned · analyzed 2026-10-05.
4.6 ★928,946 ratings
—Downloads
12+Age rating
251 MBApp size
FreeIn-app purchases
About this app
We combine the best of quality journalism with expert curation to help you stay informed—and feel good while doing it. Discover top news from premium publishers in one app: Bloomberg, The Atlantic, USA Today, TIME, The Huffington Post, Bleacher Report, Quartz, The Verge, LAT, VOX, AP, Reuters, Buzzfeed, and Fast Company.
Read news in English, Spanish, Chinese and more! Translate any article in your feed to your native language for easier reading.
SmartNews rewards you for staying up to date. Earn points every day by reading articles and exchange them for gift cards from your favorite brands or donations to charities you support.
Key Features
Translation: Translate articles into Spanish, Chinese, and more with one tap to read in your native language.
Rewards: Earn points for reading articles and completing daily missions, redeemable for retail gift cards or charity donations.…
Preview
Real screenshots from the store listing.
Independent evidence report
The evidence behind this assessment
This is where the page changes from an app-store listing into an evidence report: findings, important reviews, pricing and a dated history.
Which version this describes
When we ran this analysis, and what the store lists now.
This analysis describes version 26.9.30 of the app, analyzed 2026-10-05 . The app may have changed since.
The store currently lists version 26.9.30, updated 2026-09-28.
What we measured
Each line is a measurement published as a measurement, never a verdict.
Each line is a measurement, published as a measurement. Where we have not looked, the line says so rather than reading as a zero.
Developer replies to reviews
Replies to fewer than 1 review in 20
Price in the store description
States no price and billing period
Cancelling, in the store description
Does not say how to cancel
Themes reported by reviewers
1 theme reported
Counted from the reviews we have read for this app. "No theme reported" means no theme reached our reporting threshold — it is not a finding that nothing is wrong with this app, and we do not say it is.
Five-star share of ratings
65–79% five-star
Arithmetic on the stores' own published rating counts. It says nothing about why the ratings fall where they do.
In the package we scanned
No package has been scanned for this app, so nothing is published about what it ships. That is an absence of evidence about the app, not a finding about it.
Graded bands · predicate set 1.4 · how these are measured
What the analysis found
App-specific findings, grouped by what each one rests on. How they are graded lives on its own page.
The catch list 1
Charges we publish at a strength we stand behind: measured from an artefact, agreed by independent sources, or reported by enough users to clear that charge's own published bar.
Reported by users: Aggressive ad load
Advertising volume or placement that interrupts normal use: ads between every action, unskippable or forced full-screen ads.
What we saw: Raised by 51 distinct reviewers — 9.1% of the 562 reviews scanned on this store leg (App Store).
Highlighted reviews
Representative public review excerpts shown as user reports, not Appworthy audit evidence.
“Gone downhill — Too many news sources that are not legit journalism and way too many ads. It used to be good but not anymore”
“Too many ads — Had to search for the actual news between ads. Even when we open a news article we need to find what is ad and what is the news.”
Assessment & version history
App changes and Appworthy events in one timeline.
Store listing updated to version 26.9.30.
What this app sells
Useful store-disclosed pricing, kept below the app listing.
Business modelFree
Prices and terms as disclosed by the store listing.