Why You Can Trust CNET Yahoo for Android review: Elegant news feed with a personal touch
The latest version of the Yahoo app is great for browsing the latest news using either headlines or a visual layout. Personalization features let you connect your Facebook account and get stories that match your interests.
Editors' note: As this app is essentially the same as Yahoo for iOS, this review mostly duplicates our review of the iOS version.
Yahoo for Android
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The Yahoo app is focused on the latest headlines, bringing more personalization to your news feed, quick summaries for easy reading, and good-looking article pages with photo backdrops. The Android version and the iOS version sport the same attractive interface.
This is not the app you're going to use to check your e-mail or access most of the other services that Yahoo provides, but what the app does well is bring you the latest news in an intuitive layout.
You have the option to view headlines in a clean list if that is your preference, but the app also features a visual view of the news. The clean list is great for quickly scanning headlines, and you can pull down the list to refresh. By hitting the menu button in the upper left, you can flip a switch to turn the visual news feature on. The results reminded me immediately of the full-screen images in the Google+ app feed, but Yahoo places both the headline and a brief summary of the story over the lead image. The brief summaries are made by Summly, a company Yahoo acquired in March (read more about Summly here).
The app uses parallax scrolling to make the headlines scroll slightly faster than the background image to give the news feed a feeling of depth. It may sound distracting, but Yahoo has done a good job of making the summaries stand out against the photo backdrops, giving it a certain elegance while you swipe through the headlines. One thing worth mentioning is that the app doesn't work in landscape mode.
Aesthetics aside, the Yahoo app also ties social-networking services into your news browsing for personalization and sharing, but there is a slight issue. Under the menu button in the upper left, you have a button for Topic Preferences, which takes you to a page where you can connect with Facebook to have the app include more stories that follow your interests. While this process is simple enough, it seems strange that you need to connect your Facebook account in order to add topics and get a personalized news feed in the Yahoo app.
Even without the connection, if you want to share a story with a friend, you can do so using the Share button. This pulls up Android's standard share menu, which lets you share items with other installed applications, like Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter. Also, without making the connection, the Yahoo app itself will remember the stories you read and automatically try to deliver news that matches your interests.
The app has one more powerful tool that will be handy as well. From the slide-out menu, you have the option to use Yahoo's search engine. Just as in any Web search, you can enter keywords and get a huge list of results. Across the bottom of the interface, you have buttons for Web, images, or video, and each loaded extremely fast in our testing. While it seems like the app's focus is more on news, having Yahoo Web search is a powerful and useful feature on its own.
Overall, we think the Yahoo app offers an elegant way to browse the headlines, with options for both quick scanning and a visual news style.