Tech News: Updated: Facebook just launched it's Twitter-rivaling Notify news app

Facebook has announced Notify, an app that sends news-based notifications to your phone's lock screen based on your personal interests.

Finding the news you're looking for, whether you're on a smartphone or a computer, isn't as easy as it should be. Notify looks to change that. Users can hop onboard by checking out Notify's long list of categories, which each pull together the most recent news from sources selected based on your taste, interests or hobbies.

Once you customize your Notify experience by choosing either one or several categories, like "Business", "Food & Drink", among many others, you can go a level deeper and manually select which sources you want to hear from specifically on your lock screen.

At the heart of what Notify provides isn't all too different from services like Apple News or Twitter. It's the news, plain and simple. But how Notify delivers the content is what sets it apart. Bringing the news that you want to your lock screen removes the leg work of going to each of your favorite websites for news.

For some smartphone users, like myself, notifications tend to be an annoyance that I'd rather not deal with. But Notify just might change that for me.

Notify is now available for iOS users. We've contacted Facebook to find out when Notify will land on the Android platform.