Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Like Tinder for news, Lumi uses swipes to learn what you want to read

Despite the millions of dollars that companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Flipboard have invested in news aggregation technology in recent years, finding stories you actually want to read can be a serious chore.

Startup Lumi hopes to change all of that with its free iOS and Android app, Lumi News. Without needing to enter in any personal data, the app learns about your personal tastes with a Tinder-like interface. You simply swipe your finger right to like a story or left to skip it. It also asks for access to your social media feeds, so it can make deductions based on your personal history of interests and likes.

Rather than headlines and a paragraph of multiple stories to read, the app gives you the entire story – one at a time.

The data-driven app starts with local news based on your smartphone’s location and what other people in your area are reading. It spans outward quickly based on the data it’s collecting from your own social media feeds and your individual swipes. In a matter of minutes, the stories suggested by the app correlate with your personal interests.

Rather than giving you headlines and a paragraph of multiple stories to read, the app gives you the entire story – one at a time. Martin Stiksel, co-founder of Lumi, told Digital Trends an early version of the app did take the multiple headlines route, but it quickly became evident that it simply created more clutter.

Much like trying to make sense out of your non-stop Twitter feed with information overload, the entire goal of Lumi News (the name is a play on shedding light on news) is to simplify everything to the point that your Mom can sit down and instantly start reading.

“The tech space has been looking for a better discovery and navigation device,” Felix Miller, co-founder of Lumi told Digital Trends. “Once you install Lumi News it figures out ‘by magic’ what you want and it gives you content you’re interested in.”

Data science cuts down on the noise

Lumi has that magic down to a science, literally. Three of the London-based company’s 10 employees are data scientists. And Lumi’s co-founders were among the founders of music curation company, Last.fm, which CBS purchased for $289 million back in 2007.

Miller said the app uses crowd sourcing by collecting data from all of its users’ Twitter feeds and looks at 200 million articles every day. The Top 100,000 articles are curated on a daily basis. The app looks at over 40,000 different outlets, ranging from the big online publishers to niche blogs. Gated or walled news outlets such as Variety or The Wall Street Journal aren’t available through the app, since it connects directly to the source. That way, Lumi gives media companies the all-important traffic.

Once a story enters the app, it continues to live there as long as readers keep liking it. The app also allows readers to submit their favorite stories, which means Digital Trends content can trend within this ecosystem if you and your friends make a few swipes to the right. (And we shamelessly hope you do!)

The company has been beta testing its data-driven technology with 120,000 Android users for the last year, and the results are pretty impressive. The app currently has over 50,000 monthly unique and they’re spending an average of six minutes per session reading, while coming back twice a day.

“People get addicted to it,” Stiksel said. “It’s like a channel you can always tune into. There’s a story that’s always waiting for you to read based on your personal interests.”

A growing user base

Half of all people who installed the app, which includes those who didn’t even open it, end up using it in the first month. But by the second month of use, that usage number rises to 70 percent thanks in part to push notifications the app sends you twice a day with recommended articles. This option can be turned off for those who just want to read at their own time and pace.

“We discovered that 20 percent of our user base comes back every day, often several times a day,” Miller said.

Stiksel said that a survey that’s currently running with beta users found that Lumi News is changing the way people search because content is coming directly to them.

Lumi_app_screens_perspective
Image used with permission by copyright holder

“People are using Flipboard and Google News less,” Stiksel said. “The only thing we can’t compete against is Facebook. We can’t compete with baby pictures and cute puppies.”

Even before the debut of Lumi News today on Apple devices and the official launch on Google Play, Lumi already had at least one user in every country around the globe. Stiksel said it only takes 30 users in a market to “claim” that area. This allows the app to feed relevant local info to users out of the gate. With more users downloading the app, Miller said the data science will kick into high gear.

At the end of the day, Lumi’s secret sauce could be the company’s approach.

“A lot of companies are trying to do a lot of things,” Miller said. “We’re trying to do one thing really well.”

We tried Lumi News early, and it is a very seamless experience. It learns quickly, and iIt’s a great way for fans of specific hobbies, whether it’s model railroads or video games, to instantly find a never-ending stream of recommended stories on their favorite topics. Those swipes to the left also are a godsend, as they can immediately erase topics, or even people (like Donald Trump) that you’re just not interested in reading about.

If you want to try Lumi News, you can download it on the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store now.

Download for iOS

Download for Android

John Gaudiosi
Former Digital Trends Contributor
John Gaudiosi has been covering video games for over 25 years, dating back to his work for The Washington Post while in…
What will your smartphone look like in 2025?
Galaxy Fold

While smartphones are set to continue fulfilling an important role in our everyday lives, our constant companions could use a makeover. Maybe it's time for a new form factor. Perhaps this evolutionary branch of the smartphone tree has grown to its full potential, or maybe there are more refinements to come that will elevate this tired look to new heights.

There are some trends in play that may reach their zenith in 2020, but what happens beyond that? What will our phones look like in five years' time?
Wave goodbye to ports
Ports take up space and constrict phone designs, while also letting in water and dust. Little wonder that phone designers don't much like them. Apple wasn't the first to experiment with ditching the standard 3.5mm audio jack, but despite complaints when it erased the headphone port for good in the iPhone 7, almost every other manufacturer has followed suit. Much to the chagrin of audiophiles, the standard headphone port is heading for extinction in phones. Glance at the meteoric rise of Apple's AirPods and other Bluetooth headphones and you can see what may have driven the decision to ditch that port, but the manufacturers aren't the only ones to benefit.

Read more
Google just announced Android 16. Here’s everything new
The Android 16 logo on a smartphone, resting on a shelf.

No, that headline isn't a typo. A little over a month after Android 15 was released to the masses in October, Google has already announced Android 16 and begun rolling out its first developer beta of the newest Android version.

If this seems like a much earlier release than usual, that's because it is. We typically expect the first developer beta of the next Android update to arrive in February. For Android 16, however, Google has pushed the timeline up by a few months and launched Android 16 Developer Preview 1 in mid-November.
Why Android 16 is launching so much earlier

Read more
Here’s every Pixel phone that can download Android 16 Developer Preview 1
The Google Pixel 9 Pro XL next to the Google Pixel 8 Pro.

Even though Android 15 launched only recently, Google is already moving on to Android 16, which is much earlier than is typical. And if you have a Pixel device from the past couple of years, you can get the Android 16 Developer Preview 1 right now.

Typically, when Google releases a beta for Android, the Pixel lineup gets it first before any other phones. When Google announced Android 16 earlier today, we didn’t know exactly which Pixel models would be able to get the Developer Preview. But Google just revealed which models can run Android 16, and two of them are a bit surprising.

Read more