Readly Magazines & Newspapers 12+

One of my best ever buys!

Signed up to Readly at the beginning of you-know-what! I used to subscribe to Autocar, What Car, VW Driver, Audi Driver CAR etc. For a very reasonable c£8.99 a month, I have access to all these and many more and all the back-numbers. I can also look up all the iPad and computing magazines to research new products before buying. My wife can also use the same account to read the Oldie, do the Radio Times crossword and all the magazines that she is interested in. Before going on holiday I used to spend £30 on car magazines for holiday reading. Here I sit on our balcony in beautifully sunny Lanzarote searching for car tests to advise my neighbour and friend on cars they may not have considered. There is a facility to copy a road test and email it - maybe I shouldn’t do this.I have given many friends a gift subscription - nice for those isolating. The ‘Search-facility’ is very useful. I remembered reading an article about a revolutionary design for electric motors for EVs but couldn’t remember the date of the magazine. A search for YASA brought up the article.
Unlike Netflix, Readly don’t continually jack-up the price - there has only been a recent one since early 2020. At the end of COVID, I look forward to suspending Netflix but keeping Readly -It’s green, excellent value and a brilliant idea excellently executed. Thank-YOU! Paul McCann, Belfast

Developer Response ,

Dear Paul, thank you for your fantastic review and for sharing this detailed feedback. We could not be happier to hear that you enjoy our wide catalogue of international titles and that Readly makes a good travel companion! We wish you lots of happy reading :)

I simply LOVE this company

I subscribed to Readly early last year. That was way before I am now having to self isolate due to a recently diagnosed serious illness. The fact that I can access both daily newspapers and magazines from my iPad is nothing short of miraculous for me, and that I can ‘give back’ to five friends and family that have been nothing short of a wonderful is a real bonus too. I was a home magazine junkie for years, being a constant house ‘doer upper’, I subscribed to three or four a month which was an expensive habit. I can now access magazines I would never have even picked up before, Vanity Fair is a particular favourite, I thought it was all about expensive handbags and designer gear, things I have no interest in whatsoever, but the journalism is superb, I salute all involved with that particular monthly, I also love The Oldie - vanity would have stopped me picking that one up being in my fifties. I would say to anyone give this a shot, a world of reading is at your finger tips, it’s kinder to the planet, and you will never regret it, I have not encountered any problems at all with my monthly payment being taken. This service is nothing short of amazing, try it, your world will expand by miles.

Poor iPhone App Design

I really really want to like Readly and have trialed the app several times over the last few years but it’s design is so frustrating. Magazines look like their physical versions which is fine as it gives each publication a unique visual appeal and helps promote interest, but actually reading it on the iPhone is so difficult. Double tapping zooms in, often to unwanted zoom levels, normally that’s fine for reading headlines but reading wide columns or even some thin columns is so difficult without a lot of panning around. The reader button at the bottom helps, but that vanishes when zoomed in, and isn’t always available for every page. Once the reader view is open it’s near on impossible to close one handed as it’s close icon is as far away from my left hand thumb as possible, you can’t even simple swipe down to close it like a lot of apps allow. At least let us double tap articles to view them in the reading view instead of zooming in, and then swipe down or swipe left to right close the reader. Perhaps have a tap and hold gesture to show a loupe view so small headings can be easily read on the small screen. Some kind of magazine/newspaper table of contents would also be helpful, preferably with an adjacent image from the associate page, similar to how many RSS readers or Google news shows articles. Anything to make reading and moving between articles on a small screen would drastically help the experience.

Developer Response ,

Thank you for your review! We truly appreciate this detailed feedback as we continue to improve the app and the reading experience for our users - hopefully you want to give us another try soon!