Google Currents was outed last night at LeWeb. It’s a visual style RSS feed in the same vein as Flipboard, for both Android and iOS. Unfortunately, it’s US only for the time being, but as ever, a region don’t mean a thing for Android hackers. The download file is already available: here’s how to get it.
As ever with any territory locked Android app, it doesn’t take long for the folks at XDA Developers to post an APK install for a file that anyone can try out. Within hours, the Google Currents Android app was posted on the forum – at the time of writing the links on this thread were still working. As ever, proceed at your own risk, but the top bods at XDA are top bods, and it seems legit to us.
Once you’ve downloaded the APK file, just launch it from the downloads menu in your browser and let it install: you may have to go to settings and turn on Install From Unknown Sources to allow this, but after that you’re good to go.
We’ve given the Google Currents Android app a spin on the HTC Sensation XL today and after an initial long load, it’s working well. The partner content is by far the best (Forbes, Fast Company and many others) but you can add other RSS subscriptions and search from them within the app. Unfortunately, these aren’t so gloriously presented: you can see the first paragraph of a story and then you have to click through, either into your browser, or an in-app window that loads slowly and doesn’t support multi-touch gestures.
It’s a shame too that the Google Currents Android app doesn’t pull in tweets and Facebook links from your friends, but we guess you’d expect that given it’s backing Google+. As a straight news app however, it’s pretty damn polished.
As for iOS? Sorry British iPhone users, you’re out of luck for now. But hey, there’s Flipboard, right?
