Leave a Review The Economist
App quality is deteriorating fast
I have been a print subscriber to the Economist for 15+ years. Many years ago I switched over to fully digital when the app matured, the app being my preferred way to consume the content. I hate to say it but the app is declining in quality. UX often gets sluggish, random crashes are becoming a thing, the edition download has become less functional and the audio overlay interrupts with other phone audio. It appears The Economist is starting to cut back on internal support for the app, and it’s beginning to reflect on the quality of it. The poor quality edition download means I can’t use it fully on long flights with no WiFi as I’m used to. The other issues just reflect poorly on a premium news outlet like this. I hope they listen and fix the issues, and ideally get rid of the stupid audio blocking. If I stop reading the app because of these problems then I’ll stop my subscription with it.Show lessMcb0125
Developer Response
Sorry you're experiencing issues with the app. We’re rebuilding it to be faster, more reliable, and more enjoyable. Want to be among the first to try it out? Apply to join our beta group this summer and help us make the app even better before it launches later this year. Read more here https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/join-app-beta.Worse and worse
The news on The Economist is fantastic, as always. However, the app seems to be getting worse and worse. As near as I can tell, it is non-functional if you do not have an active Internet connection, despite the option of downloading entire issues. On top of that, even with an active connection, when it changes story an error often comes up saying “something went wrong”, and requiring action on the listener’s part before the next story plays. This is so bad that that I often just switch to a recorded book in frustration.
The latest update seems to have made things even worse. Not only does the applications still run poorly when there is not an active Internet connection, but it has also gotten very slow to respond, and often starts playing all by itself minutes after I have stopped it. So I could be in the middle of a meeting, and suddenly everyone is surprised to hear my phone loudly reading a news story over the speaker.
It is amazingly bad considering how good the rest of The Economist’s operations seem to be.Show lessCharlieCrutchfield
Developer Response
Thanks for the feedback and for bearing with us - we're aware of some ongoing issues with audio and downloads which should be fixed in v3.0.4 so do please let us know if you're still having problems after that. - LauraStick with the legacy app -- 2024 update
If you want to read the weekly magazine on your phone, this app is terrible. Weird jumps between and within articles—you’ll be reading and suddenly it jumps to a different part of the article or a different article entirely. It also doesn’t keep your place when you leave the app, which the old app did. And it has about 5 times as many ads. The new app also bombards you with notifications you can’t control. The same quality of journalism is there but the Economist should be embarrassed—the content is undermined by a broken experience. Stick with the legacy app. Update Aug 2024: the app is even slower, almost unusably. You open it, you wait, you click an article, you wait, you try to flip to another article, it hangs while it loads an ad, and frequently bumps to the top of an article so it can load an ad. I really want to like this app buts it's so awful vs. the old app. I'm on an iphone 13 pro. This is the slowest app I own.Show lessMmmmmmmmyeahyeah
Developer Response
Sorry you're having issues with the app. We’re rebuilding it to be faster, more reliable, and more enjoyable. Want to be among the first to try it out? Apply to join our beta group and help us make the app even better before it launches later this year - https://myaccount.economist.com/s/article/join-app-beta.