Thursday, December 11, 2014

Microsoft Releases 6 New Android Apps For MSN: Food & Drink, Health & Fitness, Money, News, Sports, And Weather

Microsoft has been surprisingly generous when it comes to apps for Android, a platform it's technically still competing against. (Sort of.) Today the company launched an entire suite of Android apps to support its MSN/Bing web platform. All six of them tie directly into existing services: MSN Food & Drink, MSN Health & Fitness, MSN Money, MSN News, MSN Sports, and MSN Weather. They're all free to download in the Play Store right now.

The new apps are basically re-skinned versions of the mobile websites they connect to, but the structure is a little more usable than a straight-up web wrapper, something that's depressingly common in the Play Store. Navigation between the various sub-sections is particularly nice, with easy swipes across the "tabs" in the app. Other obvious additions (like automatic location for the weather app) and fancy animations make for a noticeably better experience than the MSN web portals, which I must say, are pretty decent to begin with.

You don't need a Microsoft account to use any of the new apps, but logging in will give you access to personalized information and saved data - particularly useful for the health, money, and sports portals. If you're a regular user of Microsoft's services, you've got a lot of new stuff to check out.