BBC: World News & Stories

Still no new news feed, so day after day I see the same old news (and promptly close the app again) Also no way to filter for news I want, rather than the articles the BBC wants me to see. Go back to the old design - more flexible, more relevant and more current than this…

The new Live updates pages have pop up ads that cannot be closed.

Inconsistent with the pictures on articles, disjointed, much less engaging than the previous version. Sad.

Someone thought it’d be a great idea to make any articles you tap a ‘slide up’ page (much like how you’d write an AppStore review on the iphone). Unless there’s a setting I’m missing somewhere, I can’t just swipe back to the main page from anywhere in the article I’m reading: I HAVE to close the article from the top first. Furthermore, and you KNOW this was coming, the ads are FORCED. It just takes over your screen and shows a video you have to close, and it wasn’t infrequent in my experience either: it occured four times in less than 2 minutes as I closed an article and scrolled the main page. We know ad revenue is important blah blah but you were already showing non intrusive (to a point) ads in the previous app iteration. Just keep that. Unless they change this, just go elsewhere to get news elsewhere e.g., Reuters or AP. You’ll get less frustration.

The journalism standards of the BBC are still high but this app does not live up to the BBC’s values. 0. The way information is organised is better than the previous app for sure - but set against that there is so much bad design and poor implementation here. It really degrades the utility of the app and I’m increasingly going elsewhere for my news. 1. If you’d like to check what a word means (and for many of us English may not be our first language), you can no longer select text and then have iOS look it up. This is a backward step. BBC - you are supposed to educate and inform! 2. If you want to get a better view of an image or video by selecting full screen and rotating to landscape, you can’t. Some charts are now just impossible to read on a cellphone. BBC - you are supposed to be a model of clarity! 3. Ads start playing at random when you scroll, whether you have selected them or not. If there was no actual ad in that particular section, it will play a blank video instead. This is extremely irritating. BBC - please respect your audience, we know ads are necessary but this feature is out of control. 4. The controls to go back are on a weirdly floating bar at the top of the screen that appears and disappears and has text flowing under it … and the ‘back’ button is quite hard to land on. BBC - please look at the competition; Guardian, Al Jazeera, NYT or whoever … they are all such a pleasure to use. 5. The user interface is just a dull monotone. No use of subtle colours or even shades of grey to help users navigate. BBC - think again. AND other outlets actively poll their customers for feedback when they make big changes — no such thing for this app. The whole thing feels cynical and thoughtless. The last thing a news organisation needs is to lose its audience.

The app is crashing on certain pages on my iPhone 13, we have to click on ‘back’ in order to go to the previous page and commercials pop up, not the best way forward, I hope you improve this new app…

I have just deleted the app after years of it being my main news app. The number of times I’ll be reading one story and the same ad takes over the whole screen was just too annoying.

The App continues to crash ! And this Black color App is ridiculous !

Articles biased and misleading. This lack of impartiality is not what journalism is about. BBC as a news source is thus unreliable.

The few times I write a review for an app, either I love it or the opposite. This recent update, although I dont recall even updating it, is horrible. First the layout is more confusing, it used to simply be news, the navigation is terrible cant swipe to the next article or go back with a right swipe, perpetual prompts for an account, pop up video ads that automatically open, cant zoom on images and cant highlight or copy words. I get that always improving is the way to go but this is simply regression. Used to love this app, now its just a pain to use really. Please change it back or at least make it more user friendly.