Stay organized and productive with all your daily activities such as News, Messaging and more. Personalize your news feed and stay connected with the latest entertainment, sports, tech and science, lifestyles—even health and fitness trends.
Stay productive and connected with SMS handling and organization. Microsoft Start sorts your messages into categories to help you fight information overload.
Play games, browse wallpapers, find shopping deals, and earn Microsoft Rewards. Want to discover more with Microsoft Start? Install it now!
*Functions mentioned above not available in all markets, actual features and display contents may vary.
Key features
📰Connect with breaking world, national, and local news
Get custom daily updates on topics you follow.
Discover popular stories from hundreds of trusted sources.
Get easy access to more than 1,000 premium publishers.
💬 Efficient SMS messaging
Read, write, and send text messages directly from the app.
Organize your messages into helpful categories (Transactions, Promotions, Personal).
Use messages to share your favorite articles or nearby places and engage with others while using the app.
😊Stay up-to-date with fashion, fitness, and lifestyle trends.
Play thousands of mini-games with only one tap.
Find great deals, compare prices and get shopping deals.
Earning rewards by just searching, shopping, or playing with Microsoft Start.
Redeem your points for free gift cards and more.
On my phone the app is unstable. Often while reading a story it goes to black screen. Or it just flips to the top of the story list. Annoying. Stalls and takes a long time to show any content. Often need to close and restart. When it does run, it’s ok. Some weeks later; this app is hard to stay. (Dead battery?) It stalls, shows white screen, and wastes a lot of time. Still, the content is good. If I find another app that has this format and content I’ll drop this POS like a hot rock. Don’t use.
Has a good variety of news and viewpoints. The latest format changes have made it clumsy. Videos are not clearly marked. If I accidentally start a video playing. I can’t stop it till it fully loads. Even then it may freeze my phone, even blacking out the screen. Emoticons are an irritant. I wish I could block them. Each time I read a story, it opens a new tab which is never closed unless I manually close it. Tabs just keep adding on. This is a waste of system resources. Time to find a new app.
The most comprehensive news app I’ve found, and the dark mode is essential. I won’t use a news app without it. Use it on my laptops too. Even has comics, like a real newspaper. BUT it has a basic problem: it responds poorly to touch! I often have to tap several times to get an item to open, sometimes I have to press and hold, sometimes things won’t open at all. It’s very inconsistent, and it’s not my phone, every other app works fine. You’d think this is like Coding 101 for a touch screen app.
There is no option to adjust the fonts. The main page has text that is way too tiny and barely readable, especially on smaller phones. Once inside the story it’s not bad, it’s just the top page that is an issue. Also often I find that stories/graphics refuse to load even though I’m on wifi and/or a good cellular connection, I just see placeholders, refreshing doesn’t help.
I have loved MS News for 3 years. It is balanced and very complete. The version change to ‘Start’, however is almost unusable. It frequently defaults back to the start following the reading of an article. It even does this if you are in the old format where you can choose your subject area. It apparently allows advertisers to lock their website in so you can’t ‘return’ to the news after inadvertently touching an ad. You have to kill the app instead.
Editing this review for the third time now because updates have been improving the functionality quite a bit on dual screen devices. Over the last few updates the dual screen capability has gone from unusable to pretty good. You can now adjust views and open and close different parts of the app in almost any way without it breaking. After some time trying to break it, I did find one bug. If you open the news in dual screen on a Duo with the phone sideways so one screen is over another, then rotate it back to book mode, one side will become the story and the other will just say dual screen mode is active. It is supposed to have the feed on one side and the story on another. The only way to fix seems to be to close the app and reopen. This is a pretty strange way to use the app, but it should get fixed. That being said, these have been very large and very quick improvements to the app. I have now gone from 1 to 4 stars. Only other complaint is still what many people say. It opens new tabs with every click instead of navigating and this is annoying.
Was great, now it’s terrible. Before they recently “improved” the app, I could see multiple articles at one time, like opening a newspaper, and I could quickly scan the page for articles that interested me. Now I’m forced to scan down a single column of their choosing. And yes, I’ve changed the view format (only 3 options) and all are equally as bad. I’m searching for a replacement.
I don’t like the new Start version. With the addition of Like buttons and comments it seems like the developers are trying to turn this into social media. If you like that, great. I don’t. There are other issues, too many to list here but I’ve sent feedback about them. I did the update hoping it would fix a video playback problem (video froze while audio continued). I don’t know if it did because I can’t get past the other usability issues to find out. I’m now looking for a replacement news app
Was a great app when I first installed it but after about 3 months it started running slow and had problems refreshing articles. The only way I could fix the problem was to uninstall and reinstall. Then when I started the app it started presenting an article and blanking the screen just as I would tap to read. I think the problems started with a new version. I got tired of it and just uninstalled. May try it again in a few months.
I really like the layout. Except for the annoying pop-ups from the bottom for the Up Next article. I constantly end up clicking on it by accident and going to the next news story before I’m done reading. I shouldn’t have to change the way I read news to accommodate and annoying pop up. I will uninstall and find something better.
I want to like this news app, as there are few tolerable options available. I tried to stick with it for a few weeks. The personalization feels too broad and I don’t feel I’m getting articles I’m interested in. Also, seamless integration of ads as “articles” is rather annoying. Maybe it’s just hard to get decent news when everything is competing with clickbait titles. Also, the default notifications are very persistent, and way too frequent. Time to move on and try something else.
overall good app but very frustrating as well… can only read articles in the portrait mode, when switching to landscape mode the text doesn’t utilize the full screen from left to right so you have less text on the screen then in portrait mode, and to make it worse most times when switching back from landscape to portrait it no longer displays the text correctly in portrait mode cutting off the left and right side of the text making it unreadable. I’ve sent multiple reports to MS to no avail.
Edit: For several months, most stories have failed to load at all when tapped. The app has become frustratingly non-responsive and slow, and it is hard to justify continuing to use it as a primary news app. Original: The recent upgrade to the format and design of this app has felt a lot cleaner and more useful to me. Being able to give feedback on which stories to see more and less of are key. I’m still hoping there will be more functionality added to bring it to the same level as Google News.
This is a stupid, useless app, with a horrible UI, and lots of problems. It doesn’t seem to pay any attention to my content preferences, the interface is confusing, not at all intuitive. It seems to be a mashup of apps that Microsoft couldn’t get to catch on by themselves, so they put them all together and hoped it would fly. Like a lead balloon. At least the ads aren’t too terribly intrusive.
The pop-up ads are extremely annoying. Many of the ‘articles’ were already embedded ads, why hijack your screen with even more? “Shake the tree! Win Money!” “Bing Wallpapers – discover the world.” The placement of the ad icon makes it nearly impossible to get rid of. It may be time to uninstall the app and look for a different news feed.
This used to be an app that offered unfettered access to a wide range of good news sources. It had surprisingly good filtering options that would let you say, “I never want to see news from Fox again!” It’s been slowly sliding evil, though. The advertising load has been creeping higher and higher. The latest Win 11 redesign has changed its name to Start for some reason…? This makes it’s icon and title make NO sense at all on my home screen. It may be time to find another news app.
Difficult to navigate from page to page and section to section. Additionally, ads get in the way and also cause navigation problems. I used your app for MSN News on a windows based smartphone and never had a problem with it. (OMG I miss that phone. Never had a problem like I do trying to use apps on androids!) It’s highly annoying to try to concentrate on reading the news and having all these ads – which I have NO interest in while trying to read – constantly getting in the way.
I hadn’t updated this in a while and now I’m sorry I did. The previous UI had images to the left and descriptions to the right which made good use of screen real estate. Now? Huge images taking up over half the screen with descriptions below – waste of space, time consuming and annoying to scroll through. MSFT has a habit of screwing up UIs across many of it’s products like VS2012, Win8 and 10, never ending changes to Azure, and so on. After yrs of use I’m uninstalling, too frustrating to use.
Pretty easy to set up and use. The articles have mostly been clear and easy to read. The app seems to get the content from the sites and shows it nearly on the app. It’s free, there’s a share function, good amount of topics, and dark mode. Biggest issue though, is the sponsored articles. The thumbnail and app layout makes the article look exactly like the rest of the actual news stuff. But the sponsored articles just open your default browser and sends you to a click bait article.
Update 3/30/31 Have reinstalled, as the current graphics and layout work well for me, and I trust the content more than on other sites. Have learned to avoid any “Sponsored” segment, as it’s just an annoying avalanche of ads. No content is worth that!!! This was my go-to news source since I got my first smartphone, but I recently uninstalled it. My eyes just don’t enjoy reading small white print on a stark black background. What were they thinking??
Very frustrated. Old app would accurately give me the news feeds I wanted, simple format. This new version is like bloatware. Lots of unwanted stuff. Hit an ad by mistake while scrolling, you end up in places you cannot get back from. Have to close the app and restart. I don’t have time for this nonsense.
Update: The stories it sends notifications for are all politics. Uninstalling … The first thing I did was set interest to science and to technology. I deselected the automatic choices such as US, politics, entertainment, and sports. My feed still has politics and sports but no science or technology as the top stories shown. Worse than worthless if it does not personalize the results. I still update later if it “learns” my preferences and does better.
Clicking the notification story does not take you to the story, it opens the app to the main screen. No reason for notifications if the story referenced can not be found. The app itself is good but would like to pick and choose from the notification panel which stories I want to enter. It would be nice to be able to read the story with an interesting title in the notifications. Update. Dropping a star. Made adjustments to following, keeps putting two back into the view that I don’t want.
Honestly, it’s still one of the better news aggregate apps I’ve ever used, although it’s honestly fallen quite a bit from when it was the MSN News app. It’s not as responsive or as easy to navigate, and the name is, um… *terrible* and not at all descriptive. I know it has other features now, but I’ve never had any interest in exploring them.
Decent news app. I especially like the local news being applicable and relevant. A good selection of topics to follow that you choose, you can save articles for later viewing, and share an article. Great syncing between devices. What is lacking is a source filter as found in other news apps. I should be able to filter out the news sources via the Android app. Thankfully, you can hide unwanted sources via the Windows 10 app.
While I’ve used this app for years as it was tailored to my interests, the most recent update ruins a majoe aspect of it for me. I previously had a widget for the app on my screen. Having headlines of various stories allowed me to see the news at a glance. It reminded me of how I used to look at the widgets on my lumia. The newest update removes the widget functionality and replaces it with a search bar for some awful reason. If this isnt addressed soon I’m probably switch to a different app.
My go-to news app, along with the NBC News app. Don’t understand all the problems that people have been writing about recently. I’ve not experienced any of these issues. Yes like many websites, many of the ads are clickbait. So don’t click on anything that says sponsored. I think this is a great app, and I’ve not seen all the story repetition or old story issues the people write about. I’m using the Android version and I think it works great.
RUINED AGAIN! I can’t believe Microsoft replaced the news app with this junk. Dual screen on the Duo was great in News. It quickly became my favorite news app… Now we have this junk, not formatted for a dual screen at all. Thanks for ruining the experience Microsoft. It’s unbelievable that you could mess up this bad. You tout the news app all over your promotions for the Duo… Did no one really think about making this work for that phone.
It’s the usual grinder of trending articles, with a nice interface and very little clutter. It feels like AMP but reads like an RSS reader (which is the only brilliant feature of this app). Microsoft account sync is convenient, and there aren’t a lot of tedious settings to manage. The MSN-style clickbait ads are awful as always, and the feed isn’t very customizable. Don’t expect super-personalized news here. The ability to add more categories and sources would make this a nearly-perfect news app
Great experience! The UI is friendly and easy to use, and discovery of features is quite intuitive. I like the tie in with the notifications and the Lock Screen. The configuratability with My interests to target articles and events is also very nice. I love being able to pi k the sources for the news I get as well. That REALLY let’s me tailor the news to my taste!!! Keep up the good work!!!
MS wants this to be some kind of all in one app but I don’t think anyone wants that. UI is also confusing at first and then you get used to it, but it didn’t feel consistent. Clicking on a news article from the home feed won’t create a tab but clicking on the news icon will create a new tab. As others have stated, I don’t want games, deals, or savings sections. Just go somewhere else for the news for now.
Very bad experience, but it’s consistent with the new Windows 10/11 news widget. News shown on the front page is determined by my physical location, although I have a VPN turned on and manually changed my language and location preference. It just won’t work, my personal feed page is always empty, and my home page is always Chinese news. Microsoft, stop assuming you know me better than myself do, please. Just because I live in China doesn’t mean I only read news in Chinese.
Frustrating app that has gone through many changes lately. You have categories for a reason, yet 1/2 the content in a category doesn’t belong. Take for example “NFL”, a large portion of the stories are college, a shooting near a high school, and high school. Some articles are not articles and instead links to some random podcast. Other articles track how often you view the sources content and then cuts you off. I’m finding myself using this app less and less because of those three reasons.
For the last several months this app stop letting you modify it for the information you want. Many articles from the same source are repeated throughout the sections. It is not unusual to see the same article 4 times by scrolling 2 or 3 inches. It shows a lot of old news for weeks and weeks. You cannot sort news articles by date
I like the idea of news from multiple news agencies, especially in our current political environment, you can’t trust one article. News now is filled with opinions and a couple of chosen facts. I was hoping the variety of feeds would be one place to be more informed. However, I’v noticed microsoft is selective of which articles they are picking from the various news agencies. I don’t want an app that tries to influence opinion one way or another, I want all stories and I’ll form my own opinion
Much improved over the launch, it’s attractive, easy to read, and fairly decent at grabbing big news. If you’re interested in the big topics of the day, you’re pretty well covered here. If you’re more interested in niche stuff, it is not always so consistent. I have also found an annoying bug, where my Xbox interest (Bing powered) no longer updates. It was stuck with the same articles for a month. I switched to the Xbox one interest, which worked for a few days before also getting stuck on articles. When I tested the Xbox interest again, which I had entirely removed, I was getting the same articles that it had been stuck on from a month ago. Not sure if this is just my copy or what, but it’s kinda antithetical to the whole mission here. I’ll reinstall and see if it fixes. (again, the main news works just fine.)
I absolutely hate the latest update. The only good is you FINALLY enlarged the font! It takes forever to load, trying to get from one section to another is close to impossible as is trying to open an article. I eventually give up either going to a different news site on my tablet or bring it up on my phone that still has the old version and works great. Since it’s taken years to get a larger font I expect it will be the same to fix all the bugs you’ve created in this mess of an update.
The 4 stars may not be entirely at fault of Microsoft. I ride the fence politically; however, there tends to be far more left leaning material. This could be a result of the segments I’m selecting. I’m not entirely sure. What I see, typically, are topics I’m interested in, but I do not believe any media outlet is reliable enough to be sole source anymore. As an app, it’s great though.
Smooth and easy to read. No overly intrusive ads. EDIT: From 5 stars to 1. An endless stream of “updates” (downdates?) have turned this once great app into a pos that I just uninstalled. Unbelievable example of “fixing” something that isn’t broken. I might still use it if I could force stories to open in my default browser (or even Edge), but I can’t. Why a company with a good standalone browser would force users to open stories in an ugly and extremely limited in-app browser is beyond me.
Since your last update, the app is broken and won’t open any article. This app does allow you to copy now, but only what you see on your phone’s screen. As soon as you move down to include more text, all the text unselects. Articles do not count against an allotment so this is very good.