Leave a Review The New York Times
NYTimes are you even using this app?!?
I love NYTimes’ content. I start and end my day with it. I’m proud to pay to support independent, critical coverage in journalism. However, you really need to try out your app in real life. I build mobile apps for a living and would get fired if I prioritized ads in my product over usability. It’s not that this app doesn’t work, but the inmates (ads) are running the asylum here. It’s impossible to scroll and peruse content while the screen updates, shifts, and goes blank to comically load content. You don’t even cache the ads between reading an article and going back to the front page view because they load all over again. I seriously laughed when I read some other reviews and they called it pinballing, and that they got seasick while using this app. So true!
I get it, making an app is hard, especially with competing demands for the business and new features. And that your team are humans, work hard and care. But really, this has gone too far. You need to take a step back, start listening to your users and take real steps to make the app work for its primary usecase - reading the frickin’ news! And add dark mode already, it’s called a stylesheet!Show lessKoopaTroupa
Slow. Complex. Hard to Use.
This app is slow to load pages and slow to scroll through pages. Advertisements always load first, and their fancy animations sometimes seem to bog my device down, preventing the rest of the page from loading. My device is a little older, but not so old that it is out of date. It is plenty speedy when using other apps. If the device is a problem, the app should compensate by loading simpler pages and a simpler interface. The app is complex. It is hard to find some articles and sections. It used to be easier to navigate, but an update made it less user-friendly. My theory is that the engineers who work on this app have gotten out of control, and are adding all the fancy bells and whistles they can, unconstrained by anyone who advocates for ease of use and speed. This used to be a great app, but it has been gradually going downhill for a while now, for the reasons noted above. The content is great, and I subscribe to the NYT to read their newspaper, but the decline of the app is pushing me more and more to read in a browser on a computer, rather than via the app.
Update: today, all I see is a spinning activity widget. The app does not load at all.Show lessPhiloratio
Find in article
Still waiting for return of your “Find” in article feature. Not sure why you removed it. Is it not possible to add a feature allowing your readers to search within an article?
Imagine reading an article that references numerous names of key individuals, typically clarified early in an article by providing their full names and their context to the story. Maybe I’m not like most people in that I don’t memorize all that info up front. As the story reads on somewhere paragraphs below one of the earlier named persons is referenced by last name only. And I think, “who is this person? Oh crap no search or find feature in the app.” Now I have to scroll back up the article, losing my reading place, scanning for the name to recall who the person is so I can better understand the context.
What a disappointment? How can we live in a digital news world and have news apps that do not provide to their readers one of the very first features we all found useful in the early days of the web, “search”. Come now? No excuse I think. Make our lives easier. Is there no “design thinking” inherent in your designs? Of no search maybe offer hypertext links to key names, words that pop up with the important context. That’d be awesome! Of course, I suspect that’s more complicated to implement than simple in-article search.Show lessGuyho
This App Desperately Needs a Night Mode Display Option
I love the NYT, so this mediocre rating is simply due to the usability/customizability of the app. There is no night mode, which just feels a little behind the times in terms of the various display options that have now become standard in most phone & tablet apps.
I also personally wish there was slightly more customizability in terms of being able to block or hide certain categories of articles from appearing. For example, although we can choose what subjects we are interested in, which will then show up in the “For You” section, I would also love the option of telling the app what NOT to show me when scrolling through the main feed. For me specifically, I don’t like reading Opinion pieces and will never open them, so it’d be great for me in terms of usability if I could just have the app “hide” those when I’m scrolling through (or hide the entire Opinion section). Other people may never read the Entertainment section, or the sports section, etc., so perhaps they’d like to be able to scroll through the main “Today” section without seeing those. It would just be a nice, extra option that could continue to help shape the content to what each reader enjoys the most.Show lessmintfreshpinesol
Only works sporadically, can’t zoom, not intuitive
I use a VPN (a mainstream, widely available one) and many apps/sites don’t load properly. NYT’s app is odd because it works occasionally, but not usually—I don’t know if this is because of the VPN or if the app is just bad (but it seems to have a bunch of positive reviews so maybe it’s just me?). When I click on a push notification, it opens the app but only goes to the last article that was open, even if it was several weeks ago. Not useful. Then, if I search for the story, it only sometimes loads. I usually end up just using the website or relying on the morning briefing newsletter (so why am I paying for a subscription??). Another annoying aspect of the app is that you can’t zoom in on photos—I find myself doing this a lot on the website because there are interesting things to see and the phone screen is so small; it’s always a frustrating surprise when I try to zoom on the app and nothing happens. Aside from those specific issues, I also find it a little confusing/unintuitive how to find specific stories. Maybe I should be able to answer some questions about what interests me, and then it curates my home page based on my self-reported likes and my past views/reads. I could then use the “sections” page as a backup. Obviously NYT is the gold standard of journalism, but I’m surprised and irritated every time I remember how bad their app is. The app does look nice—I guess that’s worth +1 star.Show lessatkw35
“Subscribe to read the article”
I love the New York Times , when I grow up my goal will be to get in the newspaper company. I downloaded the app today hoping it would bring me motivation and would give me a nice motto . I felt really good about this because it’s basically all I ever read . I decided to get in the app for a while and save some articles for later , some minutes passed and I had to subscribe to read the articles. I got so mad because I love the New York Times. I know I can still read the articles in safari but what’s the fun in that. Why do we need to pay to read articles anyway. It’s like having to pay a lot to get a newspaper. I understand a app is different but I have seen billions of other newspaper apps in which you don’t have to pay. The subscription is also too expensive , why have a subscription anyway. I hope someone reads this and makes a change in the app because seriously I’m crying in the inside. When I got the subscription thing I felt as if someone stabbed me in the back. It just feels like an excruciating thing , I really hope I can get this to be read so this trepidation stops.Show lessPollita21979
Wanted to love this app. Hated it.
This app loaded my phone with so much adware and tracking software that my phone would frequently crash and lag. I was confused about why my phone had gotten so much slower and less stable and then I realized theses problems only surfaced after I had downloaded the NYT app. I deleted the app and bookmarked NYT’s mobile site to my home screen instead and now the problems are gone. NYT is pulling some really shady dat collection and advertising tricks with this app, and the UI is terrible to boot.
This app also has a bug that makes it very easy to accidentally click on ads. This is annoying because it minimizes the article I’m reading and redirects me to the webpage of whatever company’s ad I just accidentally clicked on. I really hope this is just a bug, and that the developer will fix it, but I can’t help but think that this “bug” positively influences the developer’s revenue for ad’s that are paid for on a pay per click basis, and that at best this means they have no incentive to lose money by fixing it, and at worst they are aware of it and using it to fraudulently extract extra revenue from their advertisers.
Overall, I’m very disappointed with the experience this app provides. The quality of NYT’s content is well worth the $1/week subscription cost, but it isn’t worth all of the problems this app causes and the personal data/privacy concerns that come with this app are worrying to say the least.Show less1jdunk
Love the app, miss most popular
I am a product director on another large scale mobile app, and I love the NYT app. It’s visually appealing and thoughtful and I appreciate so many of the changes you guys have made throughout the past years. My only wish, is that you stop moving the “most popular” articles section. First it was a carousel (my favorite), then you limited it to a list view of only 4, then it was moved to a completely different part of your navigation and I had to search for it, and now it’s gone. I can’t find it. I enjoy seeing what’s most read for several reasons and am bummed it’s gone. If I could make one request, please bring this back to your timeline.
An additional comment - I find your newer navigation confusing. You’ve essentially moved the whole navigation under “browse”, not an immediately obvious title for this. And “for you” is not relevant to me, what I read, or what I do. I literally play spelling bee every, single, day and hate that I have to scroll all the way to the bottom of timeline (while it’s updating which pushes me up the timeline, to only have to scroll down more) to get to it. If “for you” was really stuff I use, it should have spelling bee but it doesn’t.
This is the only app review I’ve ever written, i promise. And I’m writing it more because I love the content and the app but wish these few things could change. Leaving feedback because I’m hoping it’s helpful!Show lessMsjm21
Great Content, Terrible Ad Tracking
UPDATE: I tried the app again, thinking maybe i was being too harsh. Nope, the advertisements are actually worse now. meaning, there are more ads now then there were when i wrote the below review. I actually showed this to a friend who was amazed this is a paid subscription. The same animated ad is inserted between every 3 paragraphs. Honestly, I would pay MORE if the ads would just go away altogether as they completely take-away from the reading experience. Just charge me more so I can read the news in peace please.
Original Review: As mentioned by many others, the content is the best in the world. Unfortunately it is served alongside insidious ad tracking that follows one from the web and into the app. Expect to see the same ad inserted between every 3rd paragraph, over and over and over. I hope you liked that book you searched for online because you will see ads for it all day using this app. Creepy, and unnecessary for a newspaper, especially one that writes article against "super cookies and advertising platforms". This is a paid subscription, not a free product. I expect no ads, or at the very least, less of them.
I'm keeping my subscription to the best newspaper in the world, but i'm deleting this app and will read online, where I can block the ads and receive a much better reading experience, which of course is the point.Show lessSoftware Guy
Terrible
The previous app was far, far better than the new one. Slow and inefficient to use (regardless of any claimed improvement in download speed). Simply mindless. For example, if you want to read an op-Ed that isn’t included in “Top Stories”, you have to click on “Sections”, which never works on the first try; go back to “Top Stories”, then click “Sections” again. This finally gives a choice of sections; for whatever reason, this back and forth process happens every time I try to use “Sections”. When you finally get to “Sections”, you click “Opinions “, which takes you to a list of opinions. But, often all you get is the opinion headline, with no indication of the author. (Yesterday, I don’t think any of the headlines had an associated author, today some do.) Ridiculous. I never want to be bothered with a Maureen Dowd opinion, but I never want to miss a Gail Collins opinion (unless she’s writing with Bret Stephens). Why make readers hunt like this for the info that they want? Didn’t have to do this with the prior app. Stupid, stupid, stupid. NYT might as well have hired someone to sabotage the app experience; sure as hell didn’t get someone to improve the experience. Disgusting!Show lessFestus Augustus
