BBC: World News & Stories 12+

Your news are very reliable and readable, also in in-depth articles. They are also courageous, when f.i. adressing the plight of Rohingas, Murder By Salman or the totalitarian turn of China, presently the plight of the Uighurs. Only criticism, from a Danish perspective: Your daily coverage - in spite of the above mentioned praise - is heavily Anglo-Saxon. You underreport events and developments in Continental Europe, including the EU as a force of global significance.

Some years ago I complained that a new version of this app made it more difficult to be informed broadly, and now with the latest change in layout, this process has continued. BBC used to be a place where you could find excellent news coverage of world news that was difficult to find elsewhere. Originally, each world region had a number of headlines on the main page, but that changed some years ago to just four headlines per region, and now the regions are more or less gone, to be superseded by “topics” where there are only two headlines per topic. One tendency that increased with the previous version, and has continued now, is to bring more video footage, where several minutes are spent on superficial coverage that could have been read in much more depth in the same time. Probably this is because the younger generation prefers video to text The main page has been taken over with coverage of the main stories only, and on the topics page several important topics where BBC was strong, like Africa, have gone completely on some days. On other days, the topic reappears.

The journalism is still fair, and excellent, and the BBC is still one of my main source of news.

The new version seems indeed to run more smoothly, and adverts do pop up in unexpected places like before.

It’s great to see the app again supporting personalized news preferences, and the UI had been redesigned to look and feel better. I’m a little disappointed to see that the app takes two steps forward and one step back, as the developers have not only failed to allow full screen video when rotating the iPhone, but now have also removed the ability to zoom in on photos. These two features are essential when viewing content on a small screen, and I hope the UX team addresses this in the future.