The Economist - News, Podcasts

Carbed Up Primate

8 months ago

Audio play is full of bugs. When new edition is available it keeps sending user to the old one. It stops in the middle of playing an article and has to be restarted. Also, when at the end of one section, say International, once done instead of playing an article from the next section it repeats the current section in a loop. That's the current version, old one had different bugs, new one will have new ones.

Philip Johnson

4 years ago

You should be able to sync what you've already read {i.e., articles that have been checked off) across devices. Second, there should be different screen color options, such as sepia, for the articles' text, to reduce eyestrain. Also, It'd be nice if it opened to where you last read instead of to the home page every time. Peace out. UPDATE. This new update is pretty awful, buggy, and ugly. Hard to believe someone is actually getting paid to make an app worse.

Wanda Nagel

10 months ago

I love The Economist content. I hate The Economist app. I refuse to even try listening to any podcasts from the app since listening to the weekly edition is a trial every single week. Why did you have stop providing the weekly edition via RSS? It is much better experience listen via a podcast app. But no, I have to deal with the errors when trying to download and pause that happens between every single article.

Jim Robbins

9 months ago

The app keeps getting worse. Are you hiring from Sonos? Latest update hasn't fixed the audio problems. The only way to keep it playing is to keep the app open on the screen. If you leave the app it stops. I've resorted to getting my economist audio content from a podcast app. Now there is a new problem when reading text. The article jumps around. At times it's impossible to keep your place in the story. Btw I signed up for the beta program and received an invite to download the iPhone app

Samash Nathu

10 months ago

Superb journalism and content, but as many have said, the app is abysmal. Slow to load, often doesn't update the content, usually laggy and unresponsive to clicks. Does unpredictable things, like jumping from point to point in an article and not allowing smooth scrolling. I tried to report all this but just received the usual "uninstall and reinstall, clear cache, etc." BS in reply. Given the multiple reviews about the same issues, it's obviously not the solution and they should know that.

Nathan Greco

3 years ago

First, I'm an avid reader of the economist, what's in review here is the app itself. The app navigation wise is OK, but I have two big issues regarding viewing articles: 1 - Landscape mode doesn't seem supported 2 - Most articles are not correctly formatted to the screen, Text starts off screen and runs off screen, so every line I'm missing the first and last word, making the app pretty much useless. I'm sure this is a bug but I didn't know where I should go to report such an issue.

Jose Carlos Castrillo

8 months ago

I mostly use the audio of this app to listen to the weekly magazine, but after some updates, the audio keeps crashing showing the followin "Something went wrong. Please wait a moment and try listening again. CLOSE -- RETRY". I have uninstalled and installed the application several times and still does not work. It is annoying that you have to keep pushing Re-entry anytime you want to play the next audio.

Eric Cain

7 months ago

Makes me want to cancel my subscription. It doesn't connect to cars or headphones well, so if you try and fast forward or rewind through parts of an article, it just skips to a totally new article. So to use it, you have to keep your phone open and in your hand at all times. They updated the app amd still didn't fix the issue. how hard can it be? an ai coding program could probably do it for free for them. at this point it's just laziness or they need to hire new coders. it's pathetic.

Alistair Hann

8 months ago

Buggy audio playback and 20 minutes to cancel subscription. For several months the audio playback randomly stops or skips tracks. Uninstalling and reinstalling hasn't fixed it. I only listen to The Economist so I cancelled my subscription (the rate was going to double anyway). You have to interact with an agent to cancel and I got 20 minutes of hard sell before being allowed to cancel. After seven years of being a subscriber, it was hugely disappointing that such tactics are being used.

Sebastien Chan-Tin

6 months ago

The previous app allowed me to queue up articles to listen in any order I want. The new app cannot do that. I will stick with the previous app until this is fixed. Update 2024-12-15: the latest updates have improved the audio portion, but the app is still below par. When used with a GPS, other apps will pause while directions are read, but not this app. I've missed the punchline a few times while driving. Going back failed, and I got to a random article. I didn't futz with it while driving.

Thomas Boytinck

9 months ago

Unlike any app I've used, it has weirdly slow responsiveness. Takes many pushes to get links to open, all the time. And it jumps a paragraph or two ahead on its own, or starts a story a paragraph or two in from the top, quite often. Love the content, but the tech is quirky. NYT and WSJ etc do not have these problems.

Dan Terhune

10 months ago

This is a big downgrade from previous app. The interface is clunky and difficult to navigate. I mainly use the app to listen to the weekly podcast, which is very counterintuitive. Even worse, audio playback of the podcast has recently been randomly cutting out before the articles are finished. UPDATE: Still terrible. SECOND UPDATE: Still, still terrible.

Hadrien B.

8 months ago

Great content, love the Economist. The app though is very bad, and that's what I'm rating here. It is incredibly poorly optimized. Loads slowly, there is delay in switching from one article to another, it doesn't put much in cache so if you are reading on the subway you'll have issues. When loading, if your internet connection gets temporarily interrupted, it won't try to refresh later and just stay stuck. It frustrates me every time I use it, whether at home or on the go.

Laura Connolly

5 months ago

I really like The Economist's reporting and have subscribed for a long time, but the app frequently crashes on my Galaxy S22 when listening to the audio version. I also don't like the fact that articles disappear from the main feed and are hard to find later, so I can't easily finish one I hadn't had time for. It seems like a publication with the resources of the Economist could develop a less buggy app.

Stephen Samms

4 months ago

1 star for the audio (podcast) part of this app because: 1) It almost always fails to remember where we left off listening, 2) When connected to a car-stereo the forward/reverse buttons in the car are mapped to the next/last function in the player so you can't skip forward 15s or so at a time unless you pull out your phone/login and pull up the app to use the on screen skip-forward button. Combined with complaint #1 makes using this app via bluetooth control useless.

Joseph Gorodenker

4 months ago

Excellent content ruined by mediocre app experience. Over multiple iterations of the app it has become ever more slick and graphic oriented, at the expense of audio usability. Navigating audio content is so tiresome now I find myself avoiding using the app (returning after a few weeks away and I'm reminded of frustration) and so I'll likely not renew my subscription. Updated review to 1 star as it seems that's the only way to get publishers attention. Fix the navigation, you're not a monopoly.

Shawn Conn

10 months ago

5 stars for the content. 1 star for the app. It seems like this app always has _something_ wrong with it. If I want to view content pass the paywall in the chrome browser, the app wants to hijack login and never works with handoff back to the browser. The app gets sluggish at times, especially with bookmarking. Audio playback drops out for random reasons, even when I've downloaded the content locally. Trying to play audio while doing anything else also seems to randomly stop as well.