Leave a Review NYT Audio
Good content, poor app performance
I want to love this app. Being able to listen to written reports is great! But there’s some problems:
(1) The app regularly has performance problems: I have a iPhone 14 Pro. This app is *slow*. Unresponsive when initially opened, no optimistic updates (if I mark an article as read, I still see it for several seconds; and the app itself may lock up). There is lots of talk of the Audm app. I had it too, and it also had performance problems. They need to resolve them. I can’t imagine how the app performs on older devices (which are common!)
(2) They are now rolling out AI read articles. That’s fine. It’s 2024. However, the articles start very quickly and end abruptly, and so when multiple AI articles are queued in a row the reading basically bleeds one into the other. The professionally read content often ends with credits, providing a clear indication of the end of article and transition to next one.
(3) Minor, but as a subscriber, it always feels like an insult when they upload their podcast content to the app *without* the advertisements removed.Show lessUser for 5+ years
The story intros are weird.
I just got through listening to a 5 min intro from the author of a story about Karen Bass. The piece itself is about 9 min long.
Why are we doing this? If it needs this much time to set up an article…it sounds like the article isn’t doing its job. I find it very odd to listen to someone talk, in natural and conversational language, to jump into a much more stiff version of essentially the same content. Is there a reason for this format? Imagine if every NYT print article was preceded by four paragraphs of the author casually summarizing the piece before dropping the big SAT words in the article.
Do one of the other: either have these writers just converse about the thing they’re interested in like they would in a podcast…or present their writing as audio.Show lessevanseesred
This app is glitchy and has a terrible flaw
Whenever iOS updates this app freezes and crashes. To resolve this the user must uninstall and then reinstall the app. However this reveals the terrible and asinine flaw of the app. The users entire listening history is deleted/erased when you uninstall and reinstall the app. You will no longer have the listening history of whichever and however many episodes/stories you have previously listened to. This will result in a frustrating and time wasting endeavor of marking as played any and all previously listened to episodes/stories. Additionally the app is needlessly slow in its UI response reflecting a design flaw in the underlying structure. This makes the app slow and poorly responsive.
These are truly disconcerting and disruptive issues that significantly degrade the app experience.Show lessxi-Man