What is NEWX? The complete guide

The short answer

NEWX is a news aggregation and analysis app built by Kaushik Technology Solutions LLP in India. It takes every report of the same event across many newsrooms, groups them into one story, and then does the part other apps skip: it shows you how many outlets covered it, where their accounts disagree, who was actually quoted, what nobody covered, and which paragraph of which publisher every claim came from. Long-running stories are kept as Story Arcs — numbered chapters you can rejoin after two weeks away. Alongside the global feed there is a hyperlocal feed that resolves all the way down to your own locality, not just your metro.

It runs on iOS and Android. It is free, has no ads, no advertising or analytics SDKs, and no subscription tier.

NEWX at a glance

If you only have two minutes a day

Everything above can make NEWX sound like a long read. It is not, unless you want it to be. The default way to use it is quick: the feed is a stack of short cards — a regenerated headline and an original summary of about 60 to 70 words, capped at 470 characters — that you take in at a glance and swipe past. When you reach the end of what is new, the feed says "You caught up" and stops rather than refilling.

Depth is opt-in, in three steps you choose between: Gist (30 sec), key facts only; Sources (2 min), which adds what all outlets agree on, where they disagree, the coverage spread and the Blindspot label; and Dig in, everything expanded with a source marker on each fact. You set the default once in Profile → Personalization, and the selector sits at the top of every story if you change your mind.

The short version is not a lesser version of a single article — it is the short form of an analysis computed across every outlet that covered the event. And NEWX remembers where you got to: a Story Arc tells you when you last checked in and how many developments happened since, so you never have to go looking for what moved. For the smallest possible habit, turn on the Top News Brief — a personalised top-ten round-up, morning and evening — and read nothing else.

More detail: News in 60 seconds and a news app that stays quiet.

The problem NEWX was built for

Two things broke at once in the way most people get news.

The first is that stories lost their memory. Follow a civic project, a court case or a policy change for six weeks and the twelfth article opens with "in a fresh development" and assumes you remember the previous eleven. Nobody does. You can search the news; you cannot research it. Try reconstructing a story that unfolded over eight months and every search returns the newest article and the most search-optimised article, which are rarely the most useful ones.

The second is that summarising became the whole product. Since the AI wave, nearly every news app generates summaries, and nearly all of them are the same template underneath — who, what, when, where, why. That template is how you write a news report. It is not analysis. And when five outlets disagree about a number, a summary that smooths them into one paragraph has destroyed the single most informative thing on the page: that they disagreed at all.

There is a third problem, specific to India and to most of the world outside a handful of metros: local news has no distribution. Global news is an industry with wires, budgets and a hundred apps competing to hand it to you. Local news is a WhatsApp group, a Facebook page run by one exhausted person, or a stringer filing to a district edition that does not exist online. Most people can discuss an election held eleven thousand kilometres away and cannot name who approved the road being dug up outside their building.

How NEWX works, step by step

1. Ingest. News arrives from publisher RSS feeds, a licensed commercial news API under a paid subscription, and Government of India (PIB) releases. Local reports also come from citizen reporters and approved local journalists.
2. Cluster. Reports of the same event are grouped into one story across outlets, so you read the event once rather than the same wire copy nine times.
3. Analyse across the cluster. The breakdown is computed over all the reports, not one article: agreement, disagreement, angles, quoted voices, figures, open questions, missing perspectives.
4. Attach provenance. Every claim in the output carries the publisher and the paragraph it came from, so you can check it in one long-press.
5. Stitch into arcs. Stories that keep developing are linked into Story Arcs — numbered chapters with turning points, so week six makes sense without week one being lost.
6. Route locally. The Local feed resolves in four tiers so a ward-level story reaches the ward, and a state-level story reaches the state.

Because the analysis runs across sources rather than on a single article, a story that broke sixty seconds ago will show a summary still in progress. That is a deliberate trade: the breakdown is worth more than being first.

What is actually in the app

Story Arcs

A long-running story kept as an object with a history. Numbered chapters named for what changed, ordered by when things happened, with turning points labelled Onset, Escalation or Resolution. When you return, the arc tells you when you last checked in, how many developments happened since, and gives you a Quick Recap — one line per chapter from the beginning — plus a marker on the timeline reading "You're caught up to here." Arcs also surface By the numbers, The players and What's missing from across the coverage. Full explainer →

The Event Breakdown

Open any story and you get named sections instead of one blended paragraph: Where sources disagree, Different angles, Voices (who was actually quoted), the figures reported, What's next, What's open, Background context, and How this source frames it. Three reading depths sit at the top of every story: 30 sec for the gist, 2 min with sources, and Dig in for everything.

Provenance on every claim

Long-press any quote, fact or figure and a sheet shows "Source: publisher name, paragraph 4." Not "sources say", not a footnote pile at the bottom — the specific paragraph of the specific article. Trust you are allowed to verify is the only kind worth having in a news product.

Coverage shape and Blindspot

A line at the top of most stories tells you how contested it is before you read a word: nine newsrooms covered this story; mostly reported one way, some another, a little a third way. And a Blindspot label appears when national outlets ran a story but no regional or local source has confirmed it on the ground. You still get to read it — you just get to know that. Full explainer →

Bias mix, including when it is unavailable

Coverage is broken down along framing dimensions rather than reduced to a single left-right score. The part worth noticing is what happens when NEWX cannot show it: instead of a shrug or a confident-looking chart built on nothing, you get a plain sentence naming the reason — an article with no confidence-rated bias score yet while other sources in the cluster are scored, or an outlet not rated because there is not enough coverage to rate it.

Local News, four tiers deep

Your locality → Nearby → City → State. A slider pulls the feed as tight as your own locality or widens it to the whole state; location permission simply picks the nearest tier for you, and the slider works whether or not you grant it. Coverage is deepest in Maharashtra today and expanding; if your city is missing you can request it from inside the app. Full explainer →

Citizen reporting, reviewed before it publishes

Readers, verified citizen reporters and approved local journalists can file original local reports with photos. Every submission is reviewed and approved by the editorial team before any other user sees it — nothing publishes automatically. There is no user-to-user messaging and no commenting, which removes an entire category of platform harm by design.

The AI news assistant

Reachable from the search icon. Ask a news question in plain language and it answers with cited sources — including "what actually happened with this over the last year", which ordinary news search cannot answer. It says when it does not have enough to answer instead of producing something plausible. Health questions draw on PubMed, MedlinePlus, WHO, NIH, ICMR and MOHFW, and diagnoses, drug recommendations and dosages are prohibited outright; market questions cannot produce buy or sell recommendations. Full explainer →

Notifications designed to send you less

Follow a Story Arc and you are notified when the story turns — not every time an outlet rewrites the same event with a new headline. Quiet hours hold everything overnight and deliver it in the morning without dropping any. A morning brief and an evening brief round up the day's top stories twice a day.

News games

Built from the day's actual headlines: a crossword, a mini crossword, a word jumble, and Let's Predict — a poll on what happens next in a developing story.

Who NEWX is for

• People with no time for the news — the whole product works as 60-word cards and a 30-second Gist, and Story Arcs tell you what developed since your last visit.
• People who follow stories, not headlines — anyone tracking a case, a policy or a project over months.
• People who want to know how contested something is before forming a view on it.
• People who check facts and want the paragraph, not a vague citation.
• People in Indian cities and districts whose own ward has never had a news product.
• People tired of notification spam who still do not want to be four hours late to something large.
• Reporters and stringers who want a byline attached to a body of work instead of a post that dies in ninety minutes.

Privacy, plainly

No advertising SDKs. No marketing or behavioural analytics SDKs. No third-party trackers. No payment processors. NEWX does not use the iOS Advertising Identifier (IDFA) and does not request App Tracking Transparency. Data is not sold. Location is optional and used only to pick the nearest tier of your local feed — decline it and you pick your state, city and localities by hand. Details are in the NEWX privacy policy.

What the app does use third parties for, stated plainly: Expo, Firebase Cloud Messaging (Android) and Apple Push Notification service (iOS) carry push notifications to your device, and Sentry receives crash and error diagnostics — a stack trace, device model, OS and app version, and a pseudonymous user ID — hosted in the EU. Firebase Analytics, Crashlytics, Performance Monitoring and Remote Config are not integrated. Product analytics such as reading events are processed on KTS's own servers and are not shared with anyone. The privacy policy carries the full table.

How NEWX treats publishers

NEWX does not republish third-party articles. For externally sourced news it shows a regenerated headline and a short original summary of the reported facts, always labelled with the publisher's name and always linking to the publisher's own article for the full story. Publisher pages are not reproduced, their reporting is not presented as NEWX's own, and paywalls are not bypassed. Article images load directly from the publisher's own servers via the Open Graph and feed image URLs they publish for that purpose. Rights holders can reach support@kts.international or use the copyright & takedown policy.

What NEWX is not good at yet

Worth saying out loud, because you will run into these:

• Local depth is uneven. Maharashtra is well covered; smaller cities elsewhere are thin.
• Fresh stories need a minute. The breakdown runs across sources, so a story that broke moments ago shows a summary still in progress.
• Single-source stories get no breakdown. If one outlet covered it, there is no disagreement to name and no bias mix to compute.
• It is a layer above publishers, not a replacement. It will not replace a subscription to an outlet you value — it points you at them.

How to get NEWX

Google Play App Store

Frequently asked questions

Is NEWX free?

Yes. One account type, no subscriptions, no in-app purchases, and no ads.

Is NEWX good for quick reads if I have no time?

Yes — that is the default. Feed cards are original summaries of about 60–70 words, capped at 470 characters, and the feed ends with "You caught up" instead of refilling. Anything you open can stay a 30-second read if you set your default reading mode to Gist, and that short version is still written from every outlet that covered the event. Two briefs a day (a personalised top ten, morning and evening) will replace browsing altogether if you want them to.

Is NEWX just another AI news summariser?

No. Summarising is a commodity feature every app has now. What NEWX adds is the structure around the summary — where sources disagree, who was quoted, which numbers appeared, what is still open, what nobody covered, and the publisher and paragraph behind every claim.

What languages does NEWX support?

English, Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Kannada and Punjabi, for both the interface and the content.

Does NEWX work outside India?

The app works identically everywhere with no region gating. Only the content differs. The Local News tab is currently populated for India, so a reader elsewhere gets a full Global News feed and an empty Local tab.

Does NEWX show ads or track me?

No ads, no ad SDKs, no marketing/behavioural analytics SDKs, no third-party trackers, no IDFA and no App Tracking Transparency prompt. Data is not sold.

Who builds NEWX?

Kaushik Technology Solutions LLP (KTS), a product technology company in India. Contact: support@kts.international.