Facebook launches a Twitter like app called Notify

Facebook released a new iOS app recently which is exclusively for notifications. The app named Notify is the company's latest attempt to use its own alerts to bring an impact in the eyes of the consumers through their mobiles.

The app lets you set an array of notifications for weather, news, sports and entertainment, from 72 well-known online publishers, including BuzzFeed.com and The New York Times.

With the notify app, the company is making sure to hook users towards its growing family of apps. This isn’t the first time that the company is trying something new. In 2013, the company took its chances with Facebook Home, an app and series of core services integrated into Android devices. However, users didn’t like the idea of Facebook taking over their home and lock screens, and the project was eventually dropped.

Notify is a restrained app because it is designed to simply deliver premium, curated content from Facebook's publishing partners. As soon as you open Notify, you see a couple of requests that ask for approval to send notifications and track your location for local weather and news updates. You can then choose from dozens of specialized stations, including end-of-game summaries from Fox Sports, historical pictures from Getty Images, breaking news from CNN.com and the stories of the day from Vice.com. ou can also search for curated content from specific sources, such as Vanity Fair, which has four separate stations for cover stories, TV news, election 2016 news and "This Week in Culture." You start to receive notifications when the stations are enabled using the associated toggle switches.

Notify houses a deep catalog of sources and topics, including business, science and technology, "celeb and gossip," lifestyle, and gaming and fun. You can save certain notifications in the app for later, and Notify shows all the notifications you received during the last 24 hours in an in-app feed. Notifications appear on your iOS lock screen, just like alerts from any other mobile app. Notify has an in-app browser. When you tap on notifications that you like, the app sends related content to this in-app browser instead of a third party browser like Chrome or Safari.

Notify also operates alongside Facebook's Instant Articles project, which delivers news articles and media in a more polished and streamlined manner to your Facebook News Feeds.