The Guardian Editions

This is a farce, and an unbelievably retrograde step. Absolutely counter-intuitive, and just a mess. This looks like the end of a long relationship.

Long time IPad app subscriber. Redesign really not thought through. NYT app gets better. This got worse. Why?

Hovering between two and three stars but opted for two as I have had to delete and download the app for the second time. I quite like the layout but the app has too many errors and too many spelling mistakes in the edition. It almost reminded me of the old days of the Grauniad!

The old app was so good. I’m really not at all happy with this new effort. Skeumorphism died for good reason! Horrible.

I really don’t mind the new look, as it reminds me of reading the hard copy years ago, with the convenient ability to hone in on the individual linked articles. But I am troubled that sometimes those highlighted heading links don’t appear, which means I have to shift and zoom in on articles which is very trying and I often give up. Also, although I believe it was stated that the daily would be available earlier than the old version, the latest Observer didn’t appear until long after I normally read the paper on Sunday. Solve those issues and I’ll be quite content.

As with other commentators, the new pdf version seems atrocious to me. Difficult to navigate, unfriendly for anyone with aging eyesight and I cannot scan through quickly to see what I want. I will try and persevere for another month, but unless it improves, I am cancelling my subscription to Editions and going back to other ways of getting the news - and I don’t mean buying a physical newspaper!

**********Update 30/12/24. I have a solution - dump the appalling Editions app and use the Guardian app instead. I never knew it existed until my son said that he uses it. It’s a pleasure to use. ******** These comments apply to the iPadOS version. This new “app” - a clonky PDF reader - is appallingly bad. Navigation is dire, the point-size slider’s minimum character size is too large, giving lines of text that are far too short to read with any fluency, and the overall experience is dreadful. I’m seriously inclined to cancel my subscription altogether. By adopting the print/page model you’re flying in the face of all UI trends and practices. What on EARTH were you thinking in doing this? I can only guess that it’s driven by cost. MAJOR fail. PS in light of all the 1-* reviews, some response from the team responsible for this disaster, explaining their plans to remedy matters, would be most welcome.

I have been a Guardian reader since my student days in the early 1980s. For 35 years, I bought the print edition of the Guardian every day, Monday to Saturday. In June 2017, I switched to a digital subscription, and for the past seven and a half years, I have read my beloved Guardian on my iPad every day. So it was with a heavy heart that, following the major changes to the Guardian Editions app on Monday 16 December 2024, I cancelled my subscription and uninstalled the app. The old app was an outstanding example of good user interface design. It was easy to navigate between sections of the newspaper and to "swipe left" to read each article in sequence. The text was clear and easy to read, and the use of images to illustrate articles enhanced the experience of reading the Guardian in this format. Sadly, the new app, in trying to mimic the appearance of the printed newspaper, is a disaster. It is a textbook example of how NOT to present the written word on a small screen. There are certain types of document where it is appropriate to present a faithful facsimile of the printed page. Textbooks containing complex mathematical equations or excerpts of computer programs are two examples from my own professional experience. But newspaper articles do not normally contain equations or program code. They are narrative texts, like novels or history books, and the best way to present this kind of text on a small computer screen is "flowed" rendering, such as Kindle and other ebook readers use. When the document contains separate, independent units of text, such as newspaper articles, a good user interface will present each article as a single "page", with a way to quickly and easily navigate between articles and between larger units of the document such as chapters or sections. This is how the pre-16 December 2024 version of the Guardian Editions app worked, and it was a pleasure to use. The new version of the app does none of these things. Its design feels like a slap in the face. And that is why I cancelled my subscription. I did not take that decision lightly. I already miss the quiet first hour of the day spent reading the Guardian from the first article to the last on my iPad over a cup of tea. It is not an exaggeration to say that losing the Guardian in this way feels like a kind of bereavement.

I enjoy reading a newspaper in the way the editor intended. This new app is great, particularly the easy zoom and audible features. The Journal is now fully accessible in its proper format. Thank you Guardian.

This is just a load of PDFs that is ugly and difficult to use. A real downgrade.