Noa: Listen to audio articles

It’s rare in 2024 to encounter an app with such bad onboarding. After picking topics, which couldn’t be skipped, I was brought to a screen to log in but there was no button to sign up.

Great design, but not enough publications for my interests.

I saw that they had stuff from pro publica so I am interested in trying the app. But I’m not interested in picking other sources or interests. It sounds like there is a way to sign up outside the app so I may try that later.

After I started using it, they emailed me and said they were giving me Premium for 7 days free and I wouldn’t be charged till after. I don’t even know who to complain to. I never said I wanted Premium. It is a bait and switch.

I’ve used a lot of news/magazine reading apps over the years. I find Noa to be the best of the bunch: broad selection of source material, excellent readers (even the AI ones), easy to use app. The one technical issue I haven’t figured out how to overcome is the app stops reading whenever it’s playing and either the phone auto-lock kicks in or I switch to another app while I’m listening. I’ll subscribe for a year and see if I can figure out how to bypass that glitch.

Time saving concise information with out fluff.

I loved this app when I first discovered it, however after some brief time using it, I have lots of feedback on how it could be improved. If these issues could be resolved, I would love this app and use it all the time: 1) Queue issues: when I try to resume listening to a series after stopping mid-way, I cannot resume listening to the series again. I have to manually select each individual article and intro/conclusion. Otherwise the audio automatically stays to an unrelated article I never queued. This is a repeated issue. 2) Annoying “ding” sound at the start of each article: I listen to articles both informationally, as well as to fall asleep. After just 2 weeks of listening, I grew very annoyed with the intro sound for each article. It disrupted the rhythmic narrator when I was falling asleep, and it was just irritating when I was listening to multiple articles in a row. If it only ding when I first open the app, that would be fine. However as it is, it’s way too often.

This is a great app as far as high-quality narration goes. The stories are engaging and great picks amongst the current news and are read clearly. The focus is primarily on economic news, which is what I wanted. Unfortunately, I've had issues where I paid for the service yearly and had to repay for it, and I still have yet to receive a refund for the double payment. Contacting their support takes a long time, and they aren't very responsive, and I'm honestly frustrated with them despite the excellent app.

To me, Noa feels fresh. I find it to be fair in its aggregation of daily news, and I think the “Series” section is the most comprehensive and balanced digest of complex topics in the world of news. I love it. I find it very useful.

Overall this is a great app. It’s easy to navigate, the selection of publications is wonderful, and the readers have easy-to-understand but interesting voices. The main issue comes down to technical challenges. There are often data streaming issues and some days I can’t get anything to load. Currently I’m listening to something from a publication page, but not all publications are available right now and neither is the for you section, which claims I’m offline even though I’m streaming Bloomberg and I can use other apps… These issues are pretty frequent and I’ve noticed them several times a week. It seems like it’s a relatively young company though so hopefully it’s just part of their growing pains and they’ll be able to scale out they’re streaming capabilities soon.