Swiipe is an app from a 14-year-old founder in Ireland, that lets users evaluate the news exactly as they would a profile on Bumble.Users see stories from 52 news sources and swipe left on stories they don't want to read, swipe right to save an article for later or tap the screen to read a story now. It's sort of strange to "swipe left" on a piece of news, but swiping doesn't imply that you don't like the news just that you don't really want to read about it. "If you use Tinder, you might be used to it. But my age group might not be used to it," founder Alex Goodison said.
Goodison always wanted to pay closer attention to everything going on in the world, but it was hard with school and extracurriculars. He looked for a way in, but Flipboard, Medium, and even Snapchat Discover all came up short. That was one reason he started building the Tinder-inspired news app. Instead of relying on push alerts or scrolling through endless top stories, users interact with and make a decision about the news of the day.
On Product Hunt, Goodison described his app as "a different take on viewing the headlines by a 14-year-old. Goodison built the app during his 13-week summer vacation in Ireland. He started to get interested in tech because of his father, who works as a developer for a mortgage company in Dublin. In his free time, Goodison taught himself to code through free tutorials on YouTube and a few paid courses from Udemy. He could have taken some computer classes through his school, but instead, he chose the enterprise competition, or business, track.
As for Goodison, he plans to move to the United States after graduating to pursue a career in tech, and he's not too enthusiastic about taking the time to go to college. For the job I want to do, a university isn't famously attended," he said. First, there are this year's exams and his first app to really take off. There are big exams at the end of the year. I didn't expect Swiipe to do this well," he said. "I still have to do a lot of studying."