If you aren’t a Facebook user—or you don’t want to connect yet another app to your account—step away from the new Wavii app for iPhone and iPod Touch. To use Wavii, a Facebook account is required, but the reason why isn’t entirely clear.
Wavii claims to help you find only the news you want to know by having you select certain topics or people you’re interested in. One would think that the Facebook integration would lend itself to the initial setup of the app, but that isn’t the case. Upon launch you’ll need to select eight topics, no more, no less, that you want to see news about. This list was strange to say the least and clearly didn’t have anything to do with my Facebook activity (again, why is this log-in required?). I finally made eight random selections because I grew tired of scrolling to find topics that I’d actually be interested in.
Once I made it past the arduous setup I was fully underwhelmed by Wavii’s offerings. Although you can add additional topics via the discover tag, the options don’t improve. The actual news is presented as short status-style updates. In theory this makes for quicker news consumption, but these short snippets don’t work across the board. To actually read the corresponding article you’ll first have to tap on a details page that provided little value in my opinion, and then on an abstract pulled from the website to view the full article. It’s just too much work.
You can opt to disable Wavii from posting updates on your behalf (I did this and haven’t seen anything posted to my FB timeline yet) but with no other log-in options available Wavii still feels uncomfortable to use.
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