The Economist - News, Podcasts

If you want to read the weekly magazine on your phone, this app is terrible. Weird jumps between and within articles—you’ll be reading and suddenly it jumps to a different part of the article or a different article entirely. It also doesn’t keep your place when you leave the app, which the old app did. And it has about 5 times as many ads. The new app also bombards you with notifications you can’t control. The same quality of journalism is there but the Economist should be embarrassed—the content is undermined by a broken experience. Stick with the legacy app. Update Aug 2024: the app is even slower, almost unusably. You open it, you wait, you click an article, you wait, you try to flip to another article, it hangs while it loads an ad, and frequently bumps to the top of an article so it can load an ad. I really want to like this app buts it's so awful vs. the old app. I'm on an iphone 13 pro. This is the slowest app I own.

I think it takes 15 seconds for the app to load when opened, then it still freezes when scrolling or opening a news article

The app is so slow loading even on strong wifi - especially my saved articles - that I become overly frustrated using it. But I love the content enough that it is still one of my most used.

I love the Economist and have been reading for years. I no longer read the print version and use the app instead. For such a prestigious publication, it’s shocking they just can’t make a decent app. It’s been buggy for years and remains so. For the cost of a subscription, it’s inexcusable that this continues. I have the latest iPhone 15 pro max and the Economist app is the only one on my phone that lags and freezes during each use, even just switching articles. At this point, I have no confidence in their digital strategy which is a shame since other publications have had excellent apps for years.

Have to reboot daily. App cant find article was reading. They send me links for survey that dont work. For news I respect and pay a bunch for the app makes it hard to access. Wish I was as old as I sound.

Absolute dogsh*t app. Takes forever to load anything. Glitchy audio. Returns an unexplained error as often as the thing I'm trying to read or listen to. Do better.

I use the app on an iPhone XS (yes I know it’s old) over Wi-Fi (150Mbps) and FTTH (100 Mbps). I find the app unresponsive and it crashes frequently. My other apps behave. The quality of The Economist’ journalism does not seem to extend to its app development?

I love the economist as a publication but their app is getting on my nerves. I don’t really get this issue with any other apps, but this one is unresponsive and freezes up often. On an iPhone 12 Pro which is aging and does not always perform perfectly to be fair, but this app in particular: - I’ll have to hit the “back” arrow or article links over and over to get it to register a tap - often in articles I’ll try to scroll and won’t be able to scroll for five seconds or so - doesn’t load the articles in on launch for several seconds, and doesn’t have a load animation or any indication that the articles I’m seeing aren’t the current ones. Meanwhile I’m tapping an article wanting to read it and then “poof” it’s replaced. Can’t tell if this is bad engineering or a bad phone, but judging by all the other perfect reviews maybe my phone is partly the culprit? I use several other apps like chrome and discord regularly and never have performance issues at all though. Running 3.59

Seeing the continued pleas to stop using the legacy iOS app, it is disingenuous to claim that the new version is better. If you’re going to force us to transition to the inferior app, please include settings that allow us to mimic the legacy app (i.e., one download of the weekly edition, no streaming, no links, no updates - just a digital replication of the weekly print edition). Will seriously consider whether to keep my subscription if forced off the legacy app without a workable solution in place.

Why does the app take so much time to start?