If you thought there wasn't much room for improvement within the Google News platform, the search giant is eager to prove you wrong. According to a recent AdAge report, the company is completely overhauling their News service.
This overhaul will revamp News' visuals and reportedly "incorporate elements" of YouTube's news section, anonymous sources say.
Sources also claim Google Play Newsstand – the company's magazine and newspaper subscription platform – will effectively be shut down, with its functionality set to be absorbed by Google News.
If the concept of a News redesign sounds a bit familiar to you, it's probably because Google did something similar back in June 2017. Indeed, at the time, Google pared back the New platform's visuals to line up with their simplistic "Material" design philosophy.
It's unclear exactly what the upcoming redesign will look like but it will reportedly include Google's proprietary "Accelerated Mobile Page" (AMP) technology. For the unaware, AMP is a form of fast-loading website tech that, as the name suggests, aims to drastically reduce web page load times on mobile devices.
Though these changes are rolling out to Google News for desktop as well, News on mobile devices could be getting the better end of the deal in the form of an entirely new app.
To be clear, all of this information is still unconfirmed by Google, so approach the leak with some skepticism.
Still, we won't have to wait long to find out for sure. Sources say Google will announce these changes next week at their annual developer conference. In the interim, we've reached out to the company for comment.