Magazine content is great, the application for reading it is awful. Outdated, clunky, slow, buggy and unoptimised.
Little thought has gone into optimising the content for mobile devices. Reading on an iPhone is a dreadful experience and not recommended. iPad fairs a little better due to form factor, but still falls victim to poor design. There is no snapping to paragraphs or columns when reading which means a lot of manual zooming, with the perspective resetting for each page and not saving progress.
The app is aesthetically ugly with bad colour and UI choices. It is notably outdated still using iOS 6 or earlier basic tools and frameworks. It puts barriers in the way of accessing content and has a poor interface and at times confusing navigation, with areas of the app unresponsive or missing. Verification on purchases is arduous and occurs every time time you go back to the menu, regardless of where you have come from; it is not a one-time action.
If the process of browsing and accessing editions is clunky and slow, the reading and viewing of content is appalling. You can choose to read a magazine straight from the cloud or download it. However even if you choose to download to your device each individual page must load every time you view it, as you come to that page (so if you come out of that edition and back in, all pages must load one-by-one). This should all be done in the initial download process; there should be no need for pages to load once you then enter the app. That this occurs repeatedly and for every page, triggered only when you come to that page, effectively kills the usability of the app to read articles or view content. Even with a fast WiFi connection the lack of optimisation makes this process slow and inhibitive.
There are also banner ads on every edition for ASC products. Unacceptable given you are paying a premium price for the content. You must manually close each with a UI ‘cross’. These reload every time you reenter an edition. The banner ads also fall victim to the loading delays which prevents you from closing them until they have loaded on to the page fully.
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