The Economist - News, Podcasts for Android

I recently started a subscription to The Economist. I subscribe to about 1/2 dozen periodicals and I find myself going here first. The writing is concise and to the point, generally liberal, but always factual. The Econmist covers the world and often provided a very interesting take on US politics and society.

I love the economist, but I’m close to giving up on the digital version. They make it incredibly hard to find an article or a podcast not featured on the current opening page. The search function is buggy — when you do a search, the list of possibilities comes up, but as you scroll it just jumps to an article, without your clicking on anything. The only way to clear the search page is to close the app and reopen it. And please please create a way to see podcasts all in one place. I’ve spent the last 15 minutes trying to find a podcast released two weeks ago, and the app makes it impossible.

Generally a great news app, but a download features are terrible: 1) Why do downloads take sooooo long? Are you downloading multimedia? If so, offer an option for text/graphics only. I don’t need audio/video. By comparison, FT app downloads its offline edition in ~min. 2) I can’t queue downloads?! Unbelievable. Rest of the app is perfectly fine, but the above make it nearly unusable for travel.

Sadly, this app is problematic on older devices, with overly long page load times and frequent crashes (twice this morning while trying to read the news over breakfast). It lags badly while loading all the unnecessary and unwanted links to other articles and ads. I still prefer the legacy app, particularly when traveling and without internet connectivity.

Content exceptional. Shame the app has so many problems..