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.Good with 2 big flaws
This app overall is quite well done but there are two big flaws I wish they would fix. Both are a form of bloatware I believe:
1. There is an ad loaded/displayed between EVERY story. Come on! Plus the ads take a second or two to load, so that’s happening every time you flip between stories.
2. It almost never remembers my place: i.e. whenever I flip back to the app it almost always reloads to the Home Screen instead of the last article I was reading. I’m no developer but I assume this is because the app itself must be some kind of resource hog and so it’s getting killed in the background whenever I switch to something else. Please fix! It’s tedious to have to always bookmark my current story and then navigate back to it every time I switch to the app.Show lessthe-batman
Content is outstanding, delivery just meh.
Firstly, I’m an iOS user and get my content from the Economist primarily via audio. This content is fantastic - no complaints and gets five stars. But this is an app review and the app is frustrating for several reasons but primarily because I have no idea how to manage and use the audio “queue”. There is no obvious way to initiate the audio play feature except if you only care to play the audio from an article that is showing in the weekly section. In the Home Screen I want a nice big button that says “Audio Queue” it something like that and in which a means of adding you and deleting from the queue is possible. I have been using this app for over 5 yrs and this morning as I write this review, I have no idea how to start playing the selection of articles I was listening to yesterday!! This is awful! Economist, please fire your app developer and hire someone.. anyone else.Show lessmsb64
Excellent
The Economist is my favorite news magazine and the app is easy to use and well designed. it is certainly one of the most reliable sources of analysis and information for me. However there are two areas which I find which the Economist fails to take its usual broad-minded approach of treating both sides of the issue., the first is the debate around climate change. The Economist has decided to editorially to accept the often one-sided claims of so-called climate alarmists. Although this is obviously an area where there is robust debate, tht Economist usually fails to provide the other side of the debate, which does not see the world was facing an imminent catastrophe due to climate change. There is simply too much evidence against the alarmist view to justify it being ignored. The other area has to do with race relations in the United States, in which parallel to the climate debate that usually takes a one-sided view, and fails to consider seriously the vast amounts of evidence rejecting the thesis of widespread racism in the United States. Nonetheless, it is brilliantly, written, engaging, and in most cases, except for those, I’ve indicated a real education which I learned from every week.Show less**kiankins**
Weekly edition has been broken for months
I challenge anyone on the dev team for this app to try reading the weekly edition. Start at the beginning and reas a few articles. Put it away. Come back in a few hours and pick up in the same place. Wait two days, find your place again, and read some more articles.
If they were to do this, they would uncover multiple crippling, infuriating bugs that have gone unfixed for months. Articles will switch while you’re in the middle of reading them, all of a sudden you will go backwards by several articles. The app frequently doesn’t save your place, so every time you open it you need to go back through the table of contents to figure out where you were. This is a significant regression in functionality from how the app used to work, and it’s honestly embarrassing for a professionally produced app to have this many bugs of this severity sitting unfixed for this long. Stop building new features and fix your bugs!Show lessmarmotzero
Developer Response
Thanks for leaving us a review and I'm sorry to hear you're experiencing trouble with the app. If you can share more detail about the issue you're experiencing and the steps you are taking in the app leading up to them occurring then we can investigate further. A video of this behaviour would be very helpful too. Please also confirm the iOS version and phone model you are using. This information can be sent to complaints@economist.com Thanks - MelanieConsistently buggy
I’ve been using the economist app for a little bit over 5 years now and have yet to have a consistent, bug free experience over a month long period. One of the following will generally stop working until the developers patch the app which can take 1-2 weeks: the audio will simply not play (even if downloaded), the app will crash (even if it is the only app open), the editions will not download or downloaded editions will not open, or some combination of all the above.
This is not a review for the Economist as a publication, I’ve been an avid reader of the print edition since uni and I will continue to do so. However the lack of consistency with the app is disappointing. All the more troubling is the economist’s decision to move some of their podcasts onto the app for subscribers only which would be sound business decision if the infrastructure (the app they are migrating to) consistently worked.Show lessPbjlover
Great app for reading. Not so much for listening
I’ve been The Economist subscriber for decades. I eagerly dropped a print edition (to save the trees) once The Economist app became available. And yes it’s a great app with a nice layout if you’d like to read it on your iPad. However the most important feature for me personally these days is ability to listen audio version. And that’s where this app fails. Sometimes when I try the skip the article it skips to some random article instead of immediately following one. I was very excited about an option to build your own queue. However the app doesn’t keep such articles in selected order. It’s very frustrating when after spending 15 minutes picking articles form the new edition and putting them in the queue you always hear as a next item some random unwanted article.Show lessUkrainianDJ
Developer Response
Thanks for taking the time to share feedback on your experience with audio and queues in the app. We'd love to invite you to join our next beta test for new app features. If you're interested in testing some audio queue improvements that we are exploring, please reach out to the team via email at researchteam@economist.com - thanks, MelanieGreat and balanced weekly but pricey for ordinary people
"The Economist's weekly edition consistently delivers top-tier journalism that's a standout in the industry. The depth and breadth of their reporting are remarkable, covering everything from global politics to economics, technology, and culture, all underpinned by insightful commentary and perspectives. The publication's audio articles are a real treat, turning their already stellar content into an immersive listening experience - a feature that notably sets them apart. Moreover, their subscriber newsletters serve as an excellent curated guide, providing a focused exploration of the week's most pressing issues. One downside to note, however, is the premium pricing. While the content offered is undoubtedly worth the investment for those seeking comprehensive, fact-based reportage, it may prove somewhat costly for some readers. Despite this, the overall quality of the Economist makes it a five-star choice for anyone looking to stay informed and challenged in their understanding of the world."Show lessdrewz$
