The Economist - News, Podcasts

Slow and crashing all the time!

Of course I love the economist for the content: the articles are relevant, uncomplicated, clear, interesting, timely and cover broad areas. But the app also deserves it to be sung praises: it is well designed, never glitches, allows you to save articles and gives you an estimation of how long the article takes to read. I surprisingly use all of their functionalities. And that’s without even talking about the World in Brief, the Economist’s best invention.

I started my subscription to The Economist at high school. With some breaks, your magazine has accompanied me on and off for almost 30 years. I always appreciate the depth of the analysis, the perfect match between objective reporting and underlying fidelity to a set of values reflecting a liberal economy and society. There are pieces I will not forget - as they reflect on the key events of my life - the fall of the Berlin Wall, 9/11, the two Gulf wars, the Brexit referendum, the endorsements of winning and losing candidates in key elections or the obituary for George Floyd. There are the special reports providing an in depth understanding of new trends and developments. I still love the weekly edition. I always start with Bagehot, Lexington and Charlemagne (maybe too old or too far geographically to fully embrace the Asian century and Banyan) and make time to digest the whole edition. But now there’s much more: I wake up with The Espresso (and La Matinale of Le Monde). I especially appreciate the successful mix between the weekly edition and the articles on the website. Saturdays it’s Checks and Balance and I also like it that we start putting faces to the different editors and contributors (it was not the case in the 80’s). So I am a fan, it should be clear by now, but I still believe that objectively you provide the most wide ranging and yet in depth & dense news and opinion coverage around. Keep it up - and hopefully I will be reading you for another 30-40 years! Let me finish with an anecdote: a friend and fellow subscriber stationed in Honk Kong told me he was receiving the paper version with cut off pages when not to the flavor of the powers that be!!

I love the Economist, the paper and audio version.

It’s clean and bookmarks finally sync albeit roughly. An idea: make it possible to listen to all bookmarks as a playlist.

So frustrated with all the feature regressions in the new app.

The magazine is wonderful. The app used to be too. But the new version doesn’t allow you to read an issue linearly - it prompts you to jump around. Downloaded content disappears making offline access problematic. And it’s hard to know which articles you’ve read. Please go back to the old version.

The Economist doesn’t need my endorsement of the quality of their journalism. It speaks for itself. Rather, I’ll comment that their app is wellAdesigned and refreshing to use. Their developers have made large leaps in the past several years to make the interface less buggy and more focused. I love being able to easily download entire editions, listen to articles with real narrators, and search for past articles. I have no complaints. Some uses complain of the ads, but I’d encourage you to hold your criticism. Media companies cannot survive on subscription fees alone—that’s been largely true since their inception. I suppose that makes me an ad-apologist, but if these ads enable the high-quality journalism we all love, then I feel we should grin and bear the ads. And for what it’s worth, I’ve never found the ads to be particularly distracting.

First it has no memory: I am unable to resume reading from where I left: when I switch or walk away from an article and come back, it resets to main window. Yes I remember what I was reading earlier today but it is annoying to refind from main window. This app is supposed to be the reader of the newspaper. Second, the audio option has many bugs: e.g: you can’t even see the queue. You say “clear the queue” but it does not. When you build audio queue the sequence from the newspaper is not followed (US section should not begin with Lexington column). I did stick with the Legacy app-was much better- and the Apple Podcast option (no longer available). It sounds like this app developer never finished the project since at least 3 years…

Nothing against the content, it’s good, but the app testing experience is not becoming of the publication’s reputation. No guidance, no feedback, and no thanks. What was I supposed to look at? No idea. Was any of the bugs or commentary I submitted appreciated? Clearly not. Will I be doing this again? Nope. This is not how one should treat users who volunteer to help