Artifact: Feed Your Curiosity - Reviews, Revenue and Downloads - Apple App Store

10/10

Amazing & intuitive!

Great idea, poor execution

There’s a reason I don’t read news articles on the web. They’re full of garbage ads. So is this app. If you’re trying to be better than the stock, Apple news app, then you’re gonna get up earlier and put a lot more effort into the user experience.

Notionally a great concept marred by frustrating bugs…

I’ve been using Artifact for iPhone since it’s release and I really love it. Decided to install the app to my iPad and it went straight downhill from an experience perspective… The iPad app has a couple of frustrating gotchas that don’t seem to be present on the iPhone app: Bug #1: using the increase/decrease text size function on the iPad doesn’t do anything to the text…nada Bug #2: Profile statistics on iPhone app and iPad app are out of sync Once these two bugs are resolved, it’s easily a 5 star app.

Doesn't sync across devices

I'm logged into artifact on my phone, but after logging in with a login code on my iPad, it won't let me sync my account across devices. The support team and founders have been completely MIA when reached out to multiple times over email and even Twitter. Not the experience you'd expect from a team with such pedigree.

American Tabloid App

You can’t pick topics outside of American centric topics. The entire rest of the world apparently fits in one news category, despite the app being available outside the US. You can’t follow news organizations or search for them. You can only follow one of the set topics created by the developers. And there isn’t that many. Feed is filled with tabloids from the start. It’s a worse news experience than Twitter, even after all the garbage Musk has done.

Excellent app, but « comments » is an annoying add on

Enjoyed completely this app until « comments » have been added. Looking for an app to get informed without having to see numerous pointless opinions.

Subjects and sources too limited.

Good idea, good to see comments in, but when I had to choose categories, let's just say that these were way to generic. Great example is exercise, I've rarely seen such generic boring content. It's time someone puts in weightlifting with real articles about getting stronger. I'm not really interested in women's thighs exercises or yoga mats reviews. I respect some are, but when hitting subjects such as fitness, there needs to be deeper level of choices.

Very nice news reader but…

I want more than just a slick news reader. The UX is beautiful and minimalist, the app feels tight and powerful. As a news reader, it’s top notch. Fantastic start for the nascent company. The recommendation engine is probably just in its infancy and will be greatly improved over time. I’m very hopeful here and I think this is possibly something special… 2+ years from now. I know the recommendation engine here is actually an ML model that is learning about my reading patterns and I appreciate that the app gives me some metrics and insight into how I’m training the model. I am a little concerned about how the model was trained before me, and how other users’ inputs will affect my feed. That whole thing is opaque and difficult to predict even for the devs. Ultimately, I’m unconvinced by the app’s ability to feed me an informed narrative and provide context about any given story. At this point it’s essentially a Reddit-lite, or an RSS reader with a fancier recommendation algorithm and comments. I think that a competitor like ground.news is a better way to understand coverage of a story and is a better paradigm for understanding consensus from different viewpoints on an issue.

The Ads Kill It

Nice idea but almost unusable as you end up on web pages in the in app browser with no ad blockers so see the worst of internet ads making pages unreadable. Also only seem to get recommended one source Newsweek which reprints old news with sensational headlines.

Great app, but Canadian news would be great.

Enjoying the app, but it won’t become my primary news feed until there’s some Canadian news content. Otherwise, it’s been good so far.

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10/10

Great idea, poor execution

Notionally a great concept marred by frustrating bugs…

Doesn't sync across devices

American Tabloid App

Excellent app, but « comments » is an annoying add on

Subjects and sources too limited.

Very nice news reader but…

The Ads Kill It

Great app, but Canadian news would be great.

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