My favorite VICE

VICE.com is home to fascinating, edgy news stories and documentaries that are published in a variety of languages. These stories cover a slew of topics ranging from the Islamic State to niche music scenes in London. The app version of the site provides much of the same content wrapped in a sleek design.

The VICE experience

For those who aren’t familiar with VICE, it’s a media company that has grown from a website that covered indie music and pop culture to a well-funded empire that publishes a magazine, books, and documentaries. In particular, VICE has gained acclaim for an immersive and subjective style of journalism that they’ve used to cover serious news topics such as post-Ukrainian life in Crimea and heroin addicts in the Czech Republic.

The VICE.com app pulls all these news stories and presents them in a minimalist, black-and-white design. Stories are presented beautifully with text and photos fitting into the screen, which gives you the feeling that your device has been turned into a proper ereader.

As far as I can tell, there aren’t ads in the app (or they weren’t noticeable) which makes for an excellent reading experience that isn’t common in most advertising-heavy news apps.

VICE.com also has videos within the app. Some are embedded YouTube videos and work as they would on a normal website. Other videos are directly from VICE and play on their no-frills video player.

Easy reading

Browsing through VICE.com is a breeze and provides a similar experience to the mobile web version of the site. The main page is a feed of articles that you can scroll through. In the top left corner of the screen, there’s a tab that drops down which has sections such as Fashion, News, and their popular Dos & Don’ts.

You can flip between articles and menus by swiping left and right. The swiping feels intuitive, but there were times when the app recognized my swipes as text selection rather page-flipping. If you’re interested in saving the article for later, there’s a button on the top right-hand side of the screen. It supports Gmail and Hangouts sharing, but is missing sharing via popular apps such as WhatsApp and Twitter.

Great app for interesting stories

Although VICE.com is missing some helpful features, it’s still an excellent app for keeping up on and reading all the great content coming from their site.