Urbanite app review: a news aggregator app

Introduction

Urbanite is an aggregator that provides the most shareable content from around the web. It keeps you informed about News, Places, Events and much more in your city and worldwide from the convenience of your iPhone or iPad.

This app can be downloaded completely free of charge from the News section of the App Store, and it will only take up 7 MB of space on your iOS device, making for fast responsiveness after a fast download.

Let’s take a look at its features and examine whether or not it's one of the best iPad news apps on the market.

Variety of News Sources

Urbanite serves as a source of information from around the world in both English as well as Arabic. In this app you’ll find snippets and excerpts of news articles in a news feed format which is designed to be easy to use.

Users can sign in using their Urbanite account, or sign up from free from within the app. I chose not to do either, and news stories are still available without signing in.

The interface has no ads despite its gratis nature.

Functions & Features

Users can choose to look at news items from a specific city, but the app default is to present stories from around the world. The location can be chosen by using the option on the top right corner. There is a menu icon on the top left corner of the screen which can be used to get to the main menu and further customize the app to the users’ preferences.

You can search for stories by category, tags, or source, and when the results are displayed, you can Like, Share, or Favorite any of the stories from the main news feed page without having to enter the article. A large excerpt of the text is provided for the users’ perusal.

Unfortunately I did find some issues with functionality of this app as the language selector didn’t work, bringing up plenty of Arabic stories which I was unable to understand. The three options to Like, Share, and Favorite the app didn’t work either, which left me wondering if one needs to sign up to get the most out of this app.

This was not mentioned anywhere in the developer text, however, so I am chalking this up as an oversight or lack of testing on the developers’ part.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• A source for information from around the world in English and Arabic
• Learn about News, Places, Events, and more
• Ad-free and free of charge
• Choose to look at items from a specific city or from around the world
• Beautiful and clean interface ensures you can look through news items with ease
• Search by category, tags, or source, all of which are displayed on each item
• Sign in using your Urbanite account or sign up through the app
• Like and save articles to Favorites
• Share the articles you want with friends and family through the app

Cons

• The language selector doesn't work sometimes, leaving you with stories in both Arabic and English
• The three options below each article to Like, Share, and Favorite articles doesn’t work either

Final Words

Urbanite is a nice app in conception, but it's not one of the best news apps and it could certainly use some tinkering to get the full functionality going. An app like this should leverage the iOS features to bring an awesome news app to the iPhones and iPads of users, but it still has a long way to go in that regard. I hope the developers take note and work on the issues I’ve mentioned.