LAist

What’s with this LAist thing. What happened to KPCC. Is this just an attempt to appear cool & trendy? KCRW awaits.

The app used to be kind of flaky with CarPlay, but now it seems to not work at all. I just get a blank screen.

All of a sudden, the screen comes up blank when I open the app in CarPlay. It makes it unsafe to drive when you have to open the app directly on your phone to get the screen to populate.

What I don’t understand is that this app used to be able to cache the livestream. The user could pause, rewind and fast-forward to catch up, so we *know* it’s possible. This functionality disappeared around the pandemic (when it was still the KPCC app.) Why torture those of us who are information junkies (and pay $100s to LAist) by taking this functionality away? Is it so you could pump every restart with a contributor’s ‘ad’ (which, coincidentally, got more aggressive around the time the caching functionality disappeared and the app became prone to crashing..?) Please tell us this isn’t a ‘cash grab’ effort by a PUBLIC radio affiliate, gone wrong?! As an end-user who misses content constantly because of app crashes, I can tell you it has the opposite effect: having to listen to the same sponsorship ‘ad’ before you can get back to the content you are missing simply gives one a negative association with that contributor statement. Please bring *back* caching functionality!

Most of the time when I bring it up in CarPlay it is a blank screen with nothing to play. Then it pauses when the gps announces a turn, but take waaayyy too long to play again. I’ve taken to just listening on the radio with extremely poor reception in Santa Monica going over the 405 pass. But better than the awful app. I used to be able to as Siri to play kpcc and that worked great. Unfortunately Siri constantly mis-hears LAist and I am forced to use my phone or the CarPlay screen while driving. Not ideal and, as I wrote above, barely functional.

I wish the app would include written articles :/

I love the content on LaIst/KPCC. This app, however, stinks. (This is the current version as of July 13 2023). The stream continually drops for long chunks of time, repeats, drops out again. It’s just a frustrating mess. Back to the drawing board, please.

Absolutely idiotic

Wow, I got a response to my original review and the app icons were updated. The vibrant SoCal colors are better options than the original black and white and more fitting for the former KPCC. Thank you LAist!

As a transplant to LA, the LAist app and branding make LA feel like I’m finally home. Great source of news and information!