Google Currents

» see google.com/producer/currents as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

The first time i opened Google Currents was probably late, somewhere in 2012, on a borrowed Android tablet that someone wanted me to set up. By then the app already felt redundant. Flipboard had spent eighteen months training people on what a magazine app should look like, and Pulse was already on Google Play doing the same job in a thinner shell. Currents was Google's answer to a question other companies had already answered better.

Google launched Currents on December 8, 2011 at the LeWeb conference in Paris, with around 150 publisher partners ready at launch. The pitch was that the app would pull long-form magazine articles into a tablet-friendly layout with offline caching. A producer tool let publishers push content directly into the Currents format, and Google+ integration was baked in everywhere. The producer side was the actually interesting part. Anyone running a Blogger feed could push their content into the Currents format without writing a separate app.

The shutdown was not announced as a shutdown. On November 20, 2013, Google posted that Currents and Google Play Magazines were being merged into a new product called Google Play Newsstand. Existing Currents users were migrated automatically. The Currents Producer was kept alive for a few more months and then quietly removed. Newsstand itself would later be folded into Google News in 2018, which is still alive but no longer carries the name. The Currents name was reused in 2019 for an enterprise Google+ replacement that died in its own 2023 sunset.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ how it landed ~

The launch reviews were polite. The Verge called it competent. TechCrunch said it was a credible Flipboard alternative. Nobody called it essential. The Google+ integration was the obvious tell that Currents was a Google+ tactic dressed as a news reader, and most readers were already aware that the Google+ tactic was the actual product.

~ what it became ~

Google Play Newsstand inherited the Currents catalog in November 2013 and ran until 2018, when it became part of Google News. Each merger lost a few partner publishers who decided the migration overhead was not worth it. The Currents Producer self-publishing flow disappeared entirely in 2014 without a clean replacement, which made the original launch pitch retroactively look like a year-long beta for a product that did not survive the merger.

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