After years of uttering many expletives when I opened this every morning, on Tuesday, January 18, 2022 I decided to uninstall and reinstall. Previously it was extremely slow to open and sometimes took many tries. Frequently it crashed when I was paging through the articles. I can’t count the number of times I just gave up and didn’t read the newspaper that day. The reinstall solved all my problems. I had assumed that this app would either update automatically or at least notify me when an update was available like all my other apps do. Not so. Nonetheless it’s a real pleasure to use now.

My review from a couple years ago, whenever, is below!But as I discovered today much to my disgust, this app, which was always free, is no longer! You now have to pay to access content even on this app!Blocks, go do to yourselves that which is an anatomical impossibility!The Good: It doesn’t crash constantly! The Bad: Everything else! You are still missing most of the stories that are in the old app! None of the Saturday Religion stuff, no food-critic weekly review! Why bother with any app at all if we have to end up going to the Blade Web site to access ALL content? No matter how much “bling, bling” you have for the “tech-savvy consumer,” it’s just a façade if you have nothing behind it! I’m not here to “park a car” in a dumb TARTA ad, I use your app to get a full picture of the news, not just bits and pieces chosen from the day’s paper edition! (And I still can’t see stories from a couple days back, except if you happened to push them to the “Latest Stories!”) Your old app was as good as anything out there, but this new one is still subpar, the fact that it does manage to keep running notwithstanding! Look at any of the Gannett apps to see a decent example of how to make things a little better for the attention span-challenged Millennials, while offering enough content to keep us Gen-Xers happy! (They even have a subscription model without ads; I’d pay a small subscription fee to use an app to get all my local news without having to jump around a Web site, just because I don’t have time to read a physical paper which only ends up in the recycle bin when I remember to deposit it there!) Still needs MUCH improvement!

The Toledo Blade app improved tremendously with the most recent update. Navigation is much easier now with page choices at the bottom of the screen. You can advance or go back one page or to the start or end of a section. They also restored the date and time to the top of the screen. Now if they would just let me go back to where I was before I continued reading a story on another page. I hate having to keep hitting the back button to get back there. All in all, a very big improvement and a much better app.

Yesterday I was greeted with a need to access the website using a different app. Unfortunately the change was made not considering that long time subscriber may have had to change their email address and the old address is no longer functional. I have spent more than an hour in an attempt to get things working and all I get is the news slide which I hate. I prefer the traditional look of the newspaper however I can sign in but the screen says that you don’t have an active subscription. I was able to get to the screen the showed I do have an active account. Starting to think I will switch to a Detroit newspaper , if this change was made to everyone’s accounts the digital Blade will be what sent everyone away