Leave a Review Flipboard
ISO flipboard without the ads
I’ve been a long-time user of this app and loved it, except... The ads have increased to a point where I can’t get articles to load — at all. Or, the font is so small, that I need to expand the view, and then an ad pops up on the same stinkin article and blocks the entire view panel, I have to reduce the size, close the NEWLY added ad to the page, readjust the page view so I can go back to read it. This happens on nearly EVERY article opened anymore. It’s such a PITA, I’m out here on the app store looking for an alternative to Flipboard and leaving this review. I bet I’ve been an almost daily Flipboard user for almost a decade.
IOS user here. I work in tech, work from home, this is not an issue with my home internet/ecosystem or my own hardware, but a Flipboard problem for the ads and page not loading for articles. I’d say this is around 25% of the time currently (article doesn’t load at all). The ads making it so frustrating to read a single article because they move around the text on the page, pop up in the middle of what you’re reading and then have to be closed to re-find where it was you were in the middle of a long article, or sometimes even shoving you back up to the top of the page after the new ad loads — occurs approximately 95% of the time anymore. Even for free, this platform isn’t worth my time anymore.Show lessIHateLeavingBadReviews
Great app, but declining quality of content
I really like the format of Flipboard, but the quality of content seems to be declining:
- too many puff piece articles with ‘latest hack taking the internet by storm’ or ‘ this celebrity’s whatever room is a masterclass in decorating….’ In the headline. Just banal junk.
- recycled articles from years ago from what I thought was a respectable feed.
- another feed that has heath and energy related articles whose headlines are often pure hyperbole and therefore somewhat misleading (offering false hope). I find myself inadvertently opening those articles, having been lured by the headline. Once I realise whose feed it is I just skip the article.
It would be good if you could ‘tune’ content with keywords. Eg, don’t display content with the word ‘hack’ or ‘masterclass’ in the headline…
There doesn’t seem to be an effective way to flag concerning content apart from writing reviews like this, which I really don’t like doing.
The content is ‘free’ and I guess Flipboard generates income though advertising revenue… so who am I really to complain.Show lessbdg-au
Developer Response
Hi there, please contact us at flip.it/help and attach screenshots of the unwanted content. We'll take a look at your account. Thank you.Pretty good, wish it was better
I used to use Flipboard then abandoned it because I got frustrated but now I have decided it’s better than other news apps out there. I use it for personal and I also use it for work and I contribute articles in several topic areas. I like that I can set the topic of interest, including when it comes to politics, getting a variety of viewpoints. I’m not a fan of the ads but I accept that this is free to me, and sometimes I worry I’m missing news content that should be included, but overall I feel like it provides as much news as I can possibly read any given day. There are definitely topics I wish had better coverage, but generally I feel like I get pretty good articles that interest me. and most important is that I am not aggregating news in a way that feeds me exclusively one perspective to the elimination of all other perspectives.Show lessRdfalco123
New banner ads do not go away
I used to love this app until this part weekend when an update dropped and now I get a flashing banner advertisement in all my articles even in reader view. I read Flipboard a lot at night but the new banner ad flashing at bottom on every article even in reader view has me looking for other reader apps. I would even pay for Flipboard if I could make it go away but there is no option.
***update***
Their tech support reached out to me and gave me some tips on how to make things better. One of things was deleting the cache. That fixed my spam banner ads I was getting. I have been using this App since 2010. When you click on an article to read I always click on Reader View. This takes away all the spam and even the pay wall so you can just read the article. Thank you for following up with me.Show lessjohnnyrotten6
Developer Response
Hi there, I'm sorry to hear about this issue! Can you please send us a screenshot at flip.it/help Thank you.Abusive ... Ads everywhere... Takes over audio output
Crash, Crash, Crash! Always crashing! Every few minutes the app is now crashing (Jan 2024)
First, If you want to see what users think about this app, sort the reviews by "most recent" I like to read news while listening to music on my iphone . That is impossible to do now. Most Flipboard pages steal the audio output from Apple Music ... so the music stops ... and is replaced by silence. As far as I can tell most if these pages have no audio or video but still "stop the music". If I restart the music, returning to the flipboard app again stops the music Ads, ads and hundreds of sponsored pages that you see over and over again. And then there are all the articles impossible to mute because the mute options do not provide the option to mute the content I do not want to see or care about. And then there is all the attempts at data collection ... Why am I asked so many times who I am going to vote for? So Flipboards response to my review and is "Please contact us within the app". That is it. Nothing else provided. They could say "We can help you resolve your issues or maybe your experience should not be happening" Anyway, Lets see if they do anything after I contact them. I will post here their reply!Show lessDRM 87654383557
Developer Response
We apologize for the crashes you are experiencing. Our support team is here to assist you and we would appreciate more details to help our engineers address the issue. Go to Settings > Contact us.Could be so good, but…
This is a great app in theory, and 80% of the time it works the way it should. That other 20% is what’s so frustrating though. It’ll just freeze up for no apparent reason. It will just shut down for no apparent reason. You’ll be flipping though articles, and then it’ll just refresh and go back to the start of the 80 articles you just flipped through. There’s also issues like being able to do some function at one point, and then one day it just doesn’t exist anymore (such as sorting magazines a specific way and other minor things that just go poof for no apparent reason).
And before I get a response from someone about updating the app or download the most recent iOS, I’m using a phone that’s less than six months old with the most recent iOS, and I search for a Flipboard update once a week in hopes of an update fixing the minor issues, so it’s not anything on my end.
And I know others are experiencing the same thing. They wonder out loud why I’m such an ardent Flipboard shill. It’s because I see the potential, and quite frankly, I feel like I have invested at lot into my Flipboard over the years I’ve been using it. So frustrating.Show lessTru24m
Developer Response
Thanks for your review and for being a long-time user. Sorry, you are experiencing some unwanted refreshes or freezing. We'd like to get more details from you to investigate. Can you contact our support team in Settings? Thanks in advance!Abusive ... Ads everywhere... Takes over audio output
First, If you want to see what users think about this app, sort the reviews by "most recent" I like to read news while listening to music on my iphone . That is impossible to do now. Most Flipboard pages steal the audio output from Apple Music ... so the music stops ... and is replaced by silence. As far as I can tell most if these pages have no audio or video but still "stop the music". If I restart the music, returning to the flipboard app again stops the music Ads, ads and hundreds of sponsored pages that you see over and over again. And then there are all the articles impossible to mute because the mute options do not provide the option to mute the content I do not want to see or care about. And then there is all the attempts at data collection ... Why am I asked so many times who I am going to vote for?
So Flipboards response to my review and is "Please contact us within the app". That is it. Nothing else provided. They could say "We can help you resolve your issues or maybe your experience should not be happening"
Anyway, Lets see if they do anything after I contact them. I will post here their reply!Show lessDeveloper Response
Please contact us from inside the app. Go to your profile, select the gear icon in the upper right, then Help & Contact us from the list and Contact in the upper right. Thanks!So many ads and so much data mining
(Update: Responding to my complaints about data harvesting, the developer replied that their privacy policy “explains the actions you can take with respect to your data.” They helpfully provided links. That just gets you a page with opt-outs for California and EU residents, and even that page just jerks to around the app and won’t let you do anything. My original review below stands…) Flipboard is still the best news aggregator. It’s visually appealing, it has excellent options to fine-tune what you see without creating a filter bubble, and it displays far fewer sketchy “news” sources and AI-generated content than, for example, Microsoft Start. However, It’s no longer enough for nearly every Flipboard news article to be an avalanche of jumping, blinking, flashing ads and pop-up videos with microscopic Xs to close them. (The superb Reader Mode takes care of this, but you can’t set it to automatic.) Now, in addition, Flipboard’s new privacy policy states that they will sell your data to basically everybody. And it’s a lot of data. Before installing, check the staggering number of permissions you’ll be granting the app. (In fairness, most news apps do this.) They collect far more data from your phone than the NSA. If the experience was less torturous, I’d feel better about exchanging some data for it. But who wants to give away the store for such an abuse to the eyeballs?Show lessThe Continental
Developer Response
We take privacy and data protection seriously. Our Privacy Policy discloses helpful information about the data we collect, how it is used, and with whom it may be shared. It also explains the actions you can take with respect to your data. https://about.Flipboard.com/privacy/ (https://about.flipboard.com/privacy/)A great app but.....
This app brings together web and news articles for your own defined interests. I use it frequently and it is generally good, but My disappointments are: it draws mostly on US based websites unless specific information from other countries can be defined in preferences, the search algorithm picks up on something you’ve read and keeps delivering similar articles even if it were a one off read, it isn’t able to differentiate websites requiring registration for access, and the loss of the filtering options available on previous versions. So good sometimes, but using it can be an annoying at times.Show lessBeta-Rho
Terrible
I see articles from days ago, from months or even years ago cycle through as if they’re new. I used to see comments on all articles but now I only see it sometimes and they’re always political fighting and people saying racist/hateful/awful stuff. I “unfollow”/“show less” things often and repeatedly. I’m absolutely sick to death of seeing things about Marge T Green, Elon Musk, and Florida politics, and I’ve pressed “show less” on all of them at least 5-6 times each, and I still cannot escape articles about them. That’s just an example, as there are many disgusting things I’ve tried to stop seeing but this app for some reason demands I see. If I tap-hold to yet again attempt to stop seeing Marge or Elon, it will have less options available, it will not have either of their names to tap for less, and it’ll have a basic tag #News, #Technology, whatever, which just says to me that your app knows I’ve done the maximum “show less”es and still won’t just remove these articles from my sight. Why??? It just makes absolutely no logical sense. I don’t want to see it, you advertise this app like it’s “news tailor made for your tastes” but you’re smashing this garbage in my face that I’ve asked multiple times to stop.
This app used to be so great but your algorithm can’t figure it out anymore. When I say show less, I mean show it less, and if I hit that button several times I’m telling you to stop showing it to me. But you show it anyway. Just asinine is what it is.Show lessn64king
