Editor's Review
Treat this as a notification service with a reading screen attached rather than the other way round. The point is speed: something breaks in France or abroad, and an alert lands on the lock screen before it would occur to you to go looking.
Topics can be narrowed so what arrives matches what you care about, spanning national affairs, world news, politics, sport and weather. The feed underneath gathers headlines from a spread of French outlets, and tapping one hands you to the publisher's own article instead of trying to host the text.
Two things to be clear about. Everything is in French with no English alternative, so the app is only of use to readers of the language. And it aggregates rather than reports, which means the reliability of any given alert is the reliability of whoever wrote it. Left unconfigured, the volume of notifications is heavy enough that people stop reading them, which defeats the purpose. The 4.37 average across five million installs describes an app that does one narrow job quickly and does not pretend to more.
Features
Push alerts as stories break, without opening the app
Topic categories covering France, world news, politics, sport and weather
Aggregated headline feed drawn from several French outlets
Links through to the publisher's full article
Control over which categories trigger a notification
Pros
Alerts reach you faster than checking a news site would
Coverage spans several outlets rather than one masthead's view
Small and undemanding, so it runs happily on older handsets
Cons
French throughout, with no English option at all
Aggregated headlines, not original reporting, so accuracy follows the source
Alert volume needs trimming or the notifications turn into background noise
