BBC: World News & Stories 12+

This app focuses mostly on the distressing news throughout the world. It repeats it ad nauseum. There is so much news out there, it would be good for this app to broaden its horizons. It gives a bit of news from the most "noisy" places (repeatedly), but fails miserably in wider coverage. If it's not bad news, this app doesn't cover it. Except of course for the little Royals. Now that's cute. The main problem that I have with it is that if you want to read one of the stories and you happen to be way down in the column on the story, when you finish reading it and go back to the column it puts you all the way back up to the top of the column instead of where you were. That is extremely frustrating have to go all the way back down to the bottom of the column where you were!!!

This was my favorite news app, before the recent upgrade and I used it several times a day to keep up to date with news on topics and geographic regions that are important to me. Now with the new upgrade, all that personalization had disappeared. The My News feature has gone, so I can’t find news stories on the areas that interest me, there is no customization available and I have to scroll through what the app decides I should see, rather than what I want to read about. I am in the USA and used to enjoy the BBC’s global perspective over the US news channels. But now I am presented with the same news stories as other channels. Also the news presented does not seem to update as quickly as before - there are “main headlines” in several categories that are 2-3 days olds which never used to happen.
The only positive update - hence 2 stars rather than 1 - is that the videos tend to load and play more quickly and consistently. Before they would constantly get hung up on ads or just not play at all.

The app updated about a month ago to the new “modernized” format, and since then I have spent significantly less time on the app because of how poorly designed it has become.

I’m not against changing the app if it would result in improvements to the user experience. However, I don’t believe that is the case. Issues I have with the current version are as follows:
-The “My News” section no long appears, and none of the five tabs (“Top News”, “Topics”, “Popular”, “Videos”, “Live”) replace that functionality, making finding news in specific categories (e.g. “Gaming,” which used to have its own category) frustrating.
-No way to set the topics of the topics tab, as far as I’m aware.
-No search functionality, as far as I can tell after about a month.
-The popular tab lists the top 10 most read articles, and it used to label them 1-10, now it does not, even though there is still always exactly 10.
-Popular tab has the articles spaced much wider, only allowing me to view about half of them on one screen.
-Popular tab used to display the category of the news article along with the time since last update, now it only displays the time.

The only improvements to the app after the update are the addition of the “time to read” metric at the top of each article, and the fact that the overall look of the articles didn’t change too severely.