BBC: World News & Stories

The app asks for cookie consent on every single article I click on

It’s great to see the app again supporting personalized news preferences, and the UI had been redesigned to look and feel better. I’m a little disappointed to see that the app takes two steps forward and one step back, as the developers have not only failed to allow full screen video when rotating the iPhone, but now have also removed the ability to zoom in on photos. These two features are essential when viewing content on a small screen, and I hope the UX team addresses this in the future.

I’m using version 2023.1.0, which is the latest version supported by my device. Yet in that app, you now suddenly spend 1/4 of the screen estate advising that the app is evolving and have links to upgrade via the App Store. I’m very happy with the news app in general, but this particular issue really bugs me.

It was better red!

Ever since the newest update, I can no longer open the app. It keeps saying “Sorry you can’t install this product”.

Used to use the app several times a day but since the revamp it’s become useless You can’t search for articles, pick which areas interest you and the “topics” section is completely pointless.

Where did the ability to search go? How frustrating to hear about a news story from others - especially a specific BBC article- and I can’t find it because I can neither search for an article or refine my own ‘topics’. I’m being forced news on American politics, golf and tennis, but can’t self-select news from the UK or areas of interest.

Some years ago I complained that a new version of this app made it more difficult to be informed broadly, and now with the latest change in layout, this process has continued. BBC used to be a place where you could find excellent news coverage of world news that was difficult to find elsewhere. Originally, each world region had a number of headlines on the main page, but that changed some years ago to just four headlines per region, and now the regions are more or less gone, to be superseded by “topics” where there are only two headlines per topic. One tendency that increased with the previous version, and has continued now, is to bring more video footage, where several minutes are spent on superficial coverage that could have been read in much more depth in the same time. Probably this is because the younger generation prefers video to text The main page has been taken over with coverage of the main stories only, and on the topics page several important topics where BBC was strong, like Africa, have gone completely on some days. On other days, the topic reappears. The journalism is still fair, and excellent, and the BBC is still one of my main source of news. The new version seems indeed to run more smoothly, and adverts do pop up in unexpected places like before.

I find that BBC is leaning to the left. I also find, that they aren’t trying to stay objective or at least be somewhat objective.

App is great and i used it for a long time but decided to delete due to unfortunate heavy bias. Especially in the israeli-palastinian conflict where bbc tries way way too often to balance and “both sides” the situation. I was way to clear that they wanted to diverge attention from unjust mass murder. Very unfortunate and i will not recommend this media any more.