Yesterday, Google announced the News Initiative, with wide-ranging objectives such as empowering quality journalism in the digital age and fighting the spread of fake news. There are many facets to the initiative, including making it easier for readers to subscribe to news outlets. To make it easier for journalists to do their jobs, there's Outline. Built by Alphabet incubator Jigsaw (formerly Google Ideas), it aims to provide safer internet access for news organizations and their staff.

It's essentially a corporate VPN with which news organizations can create a server and offer private access to their journalists in the field. This is done through Outline Manager, where a key can be generated before sharing with those who need access. The whole project is open source but has been audited by Radically Open Security to verify that it's safe.

Anyone can connect using their organization's key through the Outline app, which is available for Android, Windows, and Chome OS at present (coming to iOS and MacOS soon). Either by accepting an invite or inputting the key manually, it's quick and easy to connect to the trusted VPN server which offers strong encryption to keep all communication private.


Outline's servers will automatically update when new security settings become available, and none of your web traffic is ever logged. Organizations have complete control over how many people are on their server, and the whole thing is incredibly easy to set up and maintain.

The app is already available to download on the Play Store, or you can sideload it from APK Mirror.

Price: Free