The Sydney Morning Herald

Highly recommend

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What a great site. Inexpensive and informative, expressing informed views. I read it every day, as my main source of information.

App does not refresh the newspaper and does not give the tools to allow manual refresh even deleting the app and then restoring sometimes does not give a refresh of the app. At the moment I am currently stuck on Thursdays edition of the paper and cannot move from it it is not good enough for a subscription

You forced me to update the app, logged me out in the process, and now I can’t login. The Subscribe/login screen pops for less than a second and promptly disappears. The app is now totally useless to me.

Would be 5 star if letters and column 8 were found in the same section every day

This has to be a best example of a poorly written app. Just have a look at all the negative reviews to get the compass of the failures of this app. I agree with them all and there’s no sense in repeating the myriad of complaints. Whoever are the senior executives responsible of over sighting the development and acceptance of this app should be fired without delay and never to be rehired by any news outlet attempting digital content. No wonder newspaper readerships are declining. And not there is the increasing lightweight and trivial content now appearing.

I use this app solely for the Digital Replica of the SMH, and it used to be quite decent and serviceable. But the latest update and redesign is a disaster. Firstly, the app has become generally more sluggish, with page turning and loading being much slower than in the previous version. Clippings can no longer be taken from the newspaper, making it impossible to save articles or clip for printing. Most egregiously, this means that the puzzles can’t be clipped one or two at a time and printed - only a whole page can be printed. This is too small on an A4 printout to read. This now makes the print function virtually useless. They even sent out an email addressing this claiming it was fixed, but the instructions they provided don’t actually work on the iPad version! Meanwhile, the full-screen text-only view of articles, which used to be accessed by clicking a headline, is now triggered by tapping anywhere on the screen. This view is largely useless, as it is missing images, graphics and charts, but it just keeps popping up. Any mis-detected swipe will cause it to appear. A stray finger venturing onto the edge of the iPad will cause it to take over the screen. Want to brush some crumbs off the iPad while eating breakfast? Be prepared for that giant, useless text view to jump up and take over. Additionally, in the pursuit of a “clean” UI, key functionality has been removed. When reading a front-page article that is “continued on page 8”, you used to be able to click on that continuation text as a link and jump to the rest of the article. Inexplicably, this has been removed. We now, in 2024, have a software application incapable of hyperlinking! Then there are the small inconveniences, like the iPad clock now being hidden when reading the digital replica. Why do this? I now need to have a separate watch next to the iPad to remind me when it’s time to stop reading and get to work. I’ve spent the past few days trying to work out how to revert my iPad to an old backup just to get the old version of the app back. It’s that bad. I don’t know what they were thinking. ——— Update: The developer response states the issues have been addressed. They haven’t. The app is still a total disaster zone, and almost all the above points stand. There have been a few tweaks around the edges, but no substantive improvements to address the fundamentally deficiencies in the new app. Front page links still don’t work, clipping puzzles is still unworkable (SMH support actually

Why is it so hard to make a functional app? In recent times this app has 'lost its mind' -- when you try to return to a story that you have just been reading it takes you to a completely unrelated story either backwards or forwards in the paper. How hard is it to produce a simple, easy to use app? I would suggest SMH software designers look at the New York Times for a simple, easy to use and well-behaved app. This is just sloppy work.

*****