Microsoft Garage Quietly Launches News Pro App for iOS

You may be familiar with the MSN News mobile app, which I use regularly across each of the big mobile platforms. Well, here’s another news app from Microsoft, and it’s currently available only on iOS. For some reason.

Indeed, there’s no explanation for this app at all. So we have to go off what we can gleam from the app’s web site—available at newspro.microsoft.com—and by using the app itself. Which you can find on the Apple App Store itself.

Oh. And it just gets weirder from here.

You can sign-in to the app, presumably so it will sync a personalized news feed across devices. But you can only sign in via Facebook or LinkedIn. There’s no Microsoft account (MSA) option.

And as far as the personalized news feed goes, the choices are really odd. I didn’t sign in, and there are no standard news sections as in apps like MSN News: U.S., World, Money, Sports, and so on. Instead, the initial choices are industry-based: Hospital and Health Care, Construction, Retail, and the like. (Maybe you see more relevant options if you do sign in.)

Fortunately, you can choose to follow companies after the fact—Lenovo, Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard and others make the list—or choose between various Skills and Products.

So … I’m not sure what to say about this one. Hopefully, we’ll see an explanation soon.