News Near You: Google News for Mobile Becomes Location-Aware

Google just launched a new feature for Google News for smartphones that can display local news happening around you based on your current location. For a while now, Google has offered local sections on its news aggregator for the desktop, but this is the first time it is adding this section to the mobile version of this product as well.

To make this feature possible, Google News obviously needs to know where you are, so if you open up Google news on your Android smartphone or iPhone today, you will also see a prompt asking you if you want to share your location with Google. If you opt-in to sharing your location, a new “News near me” section will appear at the bottom of the homepage. This feature will only work in the U.S. English edition of Google News for now.

This is obviously not a huge new feature, but it does complete the feature set of Google News for mobile and brings it on par with the desktop version.