Microsoft Start 17+

I grew up in the era of the daily newspaper, where each day’s delivery brought so much more than the news, but comics, coupons, sales, games, and more.

Microsoft Start has essentially filled that place in my life. I love having an overview of world, national, state, and local news each morning as well as a good measure of personalized topics of interest to counter some of the heaviness I sometimes read. I’ve also been using Bing Rewards for years, so having this and general shopping features baked in has been really helpful to keep me on track.

There’s so much more that I could write, but suffice to say that I am very happy with Microsoft Start and how it has continually evolved to bring ever greater value to my day.

Over a year ago, my biggest complaint was the repetitive Twitter, and Facebook inclusions that were already in the article.

Now we get the same strange repetitions within the article, plus we get more links to things that appear to be an article, but it’s just a click bait ad, I can no longer highlight a word and search the definition, and I can no longer select a picture in an article and zoom in. The video articles I am most interested in, get stuck in a constant buffer but not the one I really don’t care about…those ones load just fine. I no longer get local news for my area, so I have to go back to doing a web search for local news, because the app only picks up neighboring city news. The closest city that I can get news for is 20 miles to the city limit but really the city is more like 40 miles away. I have setup the local news and areas of interest, but it just says “Sorry! No news for this area”
Back to using google news now, which is only slightly better. Go back a few updates and you will win me back Microsoft.

Is this a news app? A browser? A weather app? A grocery delivery app? Microsoft just couldn’t quite figure out it’s use case. The dramatic navigational and UI inconsistencies seem to echo this confusion. Some pages have a back button, others don’t. Some pages are native slideovers that you dismiss by swiping. Other pages are websites wrapped in native controls whose tab has to be closed. Sometimes you can swipe backwards to go back and sometimes you can’t. There is a user profile settings page and then another settings page nested within it. Searching just brings up the web bing search results instead of a desired news article. The bottom navbar‘s buttons are identically weighted making it unclear which one is the “front page” of the app. Then there are the functional bugs. For example, progressive pages sometimes fail to load when you pull up for more content (games, looking at you). All in all, I find this app confusing and a bit aimless. It’s got the kitchen sink of features but none of them are implemented all that well.