Facebook Launches Notify to Tackle Apple News

According to the Financial Times’ sources, the Notify app will launch next week with the company already giving the green light for its release after months of testing over the summer. Mobile use accounts for 24% of U.S. media consumption, but it remains to be seen if Facebook could have the same success of this news app as Messenger.

Twitter has also launched a similar feature which they called “Moments” which features curated stories from the social network’s mobile app and from the web as well.

“Notify’s” release also follows Apple’s launch of its new News aggregator app in September.

“Facebook has become a de facto standard for people to get news, so being able to deliver real-time news through this app is a logical extension”, said Zeus Kerravala, an analyst with ZK Research.

In the past one year monthly active users on smartphone has jumped by 23 percent to 1.3 billion.

Notify will launch with its own set of media partners including the Washington Post, CNN, Mashable and Vogue.

Facebook recently rolled out Instant Articles to all iPhone users, which embeds stories in its mobile app. It received positive response from both publishers and readers. Google’s new service promises the same load speed as Facebook’s Instant Article, the only difference is that Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages works on the open web unlike Facebook’s Instant Article that is only limited to its mobile apps. Publishers can sell ads inside the content themselves, keeping all of the revenue, or let Facebook do so, sharing 30 per cent of the income with the social network.

But other attempts at standalone apps have not always been so successful, particularly those aimed at luring younger users over from Snapchat.

That said, a few of the offerings by Facebook, which were mainly developed by the company’s Creative Labs, such as Slingshot, Rooms and Riff, show that the company is yet to be the leader on mobile platforms.

The initiative would build on Facebook’s ever-growing presence as a platform for various aspects of the online news business, like its Instant Articles format for repackaging webpages as clean and fast-loading subsets of the Facebook app itself, the Verge reported.