What you need to know
- Samsung News now adds a TikTok-style short video feed for quick daily updates across multiple topics.
- Users can like videos and follow topics to personalize the feed based on their interests.
- Samsung also adds trusted publisher articles, expanding beyond videos for deeper news coverage.
It seems inevitable at this point, with almost every app adding short-form videos, and now the Samsung News app is joining in.
Samsung has announced that its News app on Galaxy smartphones is getting a couple of new features. The biggest addition is a TikTok-like short-form video experience. Samsung says this new video carousel will offer a daily mix of must-watch clips to help users stay updated with the latest news.
These clips will cover categories like news, finance, sports, lifestyle, and entertainment. Initially, Samsung is partnering with PEOPLE, ABC News, Food & Wine, Travel + Leisure, and more for this byte-sized content. Samsung also says these recommendations will be curated by its in-house editorial team.
Similar to other social media apps, you'll be able to like these short-form videos and follow topics, which will help the app surface more content based on your interests over time.
In addition to short-form videos, Samsung News is also expanding its editorial content. The app will now include curated articles from outlets like ABC News, PEOPLE, USA TODAY, and The Washington Post, giving users access to more in-depth reporting from trusted sources.
The update is rolling out to Galaxy phones from 2023 and newer in the U.S. and Canada for users using the app in English. Samsung says it plans to expand this experience to more markets and languages in the coming months.
This is the first time Samsung News has introduced short-form video content. Right now, neither Google News nor Apple News offer something similar, although Google does surface short-form content through Search and Discover. It'll be interesting to see if Google brings something like this directly into its News app as well.
Android Central's Take
I get why Samsung is doing this, short-form is everywhere, but I'm not fully sold. If anything, I hope Samsung gives users an option to turn it off because not everyone wants their news app to feel like TikTok.
