Nice app but, uh, where's the map?
News 2km is a terrible name for an app, but it does manage to communicate the basic premise of this interesting app, which provides local news based on your phone’s GPS location.
Let’s start with the good: this is a pretty cool idea. It’s good to know what’s going on around you, and in Chinese cities, people don’t tend to talk to their neighbors a whole lot, so unless you follow local newspapers carefully, it can be tough to keep track of what’s going on. It’s even harder when you’re visiting some new city and want to get an idea of what kind of things are in the news wherever you’re hanging out. It’s the sort of app that I would actually use.
It also has pretty full-fledged “reporting” features, allowing users to upload stories and photos via their phones (with a 2000 character limit), and also to follow other users and track what news they’re reporting. If something major happens while you’re standing around, you can almost instantly upload the story to News 2km and it will appear on the app’s map for others to read. That’s cool! Of course, you could do the same thing on Sina Weibo, but that won’t create an automatically geotagged news map for you.
And that’s why it’s such a shame that the map doesn’t seem to work. On a brand new Xiaomi M1 phone, I could see plenty of news stories in my area, but the map that was supposed to be underlying them just never loaded, despite a strong 3G and wifi connection. It’s hard to know why exactly that was the case, but the app also had another issue: swiping through the introductory slides that teach you how to use it was buggy and jarring. It could have been my phone, but I haven’t had problems like that with any other app yet.
Left: Reading a news story. Right: Submitting a story of my own!
At one point during my experience, it also suddenly played a loud sheep bleating noise. I have no idea why, but it scared the crap out of me, and I know it was News 2km because I found a file called “sheep.wav” in the app’s folder on my SD card. What the hell?
The app comes from the folks at Kanguo, and is available for both iOS and Android, but the Android version at least was a pain to find, and I ended up grabbing the apk off of some sketchy website I wouldn’t want to recommend here. Given that the app seems to have some issues anyway, I’d recommend you wait before checking this one out. News 2km has some pretty cool ideas, but the execution just isn’t there…yet.