Google Play Newsstand gets a redesign and new magazine view

Google is working its way through all its apps and updating them in anticipation of the release Android L. Next on the list is Play Newsstand, which most obviously is getting a Material Design facelift. That means a card based UI with bigger images and lots of transitional animations. But a visual revamp on its own isn't particularly exciting. The best news is that the reading experience for print magazines has been revamped. Until now reading a magazine meant scrolling around a PDF version of the print editions, with a few notable exceptions that had "interactive" editions. Now, you'll actually be able to browse a list of articles in the issue and open them up in a format that's much more phone friendly. You get clean easy to read text, without having to sacrifice the big images. Newsstand is also getting much more fine grained control over the topics in the explore section. So instead of just Food & Drink, you can get articles dedicated to vegetarian cuisine or the paleo diet delivered straight to your phone. The new version of Google Play Newsstand will be rolling out on Android over the next week. iOS users will probably have to wait a long while...