Steve Smith's App Review: Google's Android "Newsstand" Is Long on Complexity and Short on Clarity. "The Economist" As the Relaunched "Newsweek's" Role Model Was Tried Before.

Google is now courting publishers in its revised media strategy for the android platform. In recent weeks, the company collapsed the former Google Magazines newsstand of digital editions with its own Currents app of Flipboard-like aggregated news into a new animal dubbed Newsstand.

Unlike the Apple version of this idea, the Google app is more ambitious than just a shelf for tablet editions. It aspires to bring together digital editions of newspapers and magazines with their online feeds into an integrated whole. Since we ourselves have been urging publishers to explore this same hybrid approach within their own tablet apps, we welcome the effort. Print and digital output from traditional periodicals have an uneasy relationship in the world of tablets. They continue to exist in silos and with little reference to one another.

Google Newsstand doesn't really solve the problem so much as underscore it. The app is divided into a several discrete feeds titled Read Now, My News and My Magazines as well as an Explore section.

Read Now is...