Guardian Puzzles & Crosswords 4+

Best puzzles. Small tweaks needed to app.

Leaving five stars because I like the Guardian, want to support it, and the quick crosswords and sudoku are really great.

But the app itself has a few bugs that really need fixing and other tweaks:
1) If you click about, there’s no way to get back to the main screen on iOS without hard closing the app and reopening.
2) the text input on the crossword is dodgy. If you press a key twice quickly, it registers on the keyboard, but doesn’t come up in the app. This is really annoying! I constantly struggle to type in words and input text
3) quite often if I leave the app for a bit it will lose all my Sudoku annotations. The crossword sometimes also deletes all my progress. Also quite annoying!

In terms of tweak: Is it possible to also just add all the features to the crossword that exist online. E.g clear word. And the yellow and purple color scheme is a bit jarring, the online one is much nicer (and virtually perfect).

Other kinds of puzzles would also be really great.

From a Guardian supporter x

Developer Response ,

Hi - thanks for taking the time to leave us a review and sorry not to have responded sooner. For point 1, I couldn't actually recreate this problem. For point 2, the latest version has a much improved keyboard, so I hope you'll find that helps. For point 3, this problem has been fixed in version 1.2 so if you haven't already I'd encourage you to upgrade. I hope you'll notice some improvement. I'll take your feedback on content and colour schemes to the team. Thanks for taking the time to leave us a review.

Frustrating and disappointing product

I downloaded and set up a subscription for this app in May 2020. I have two Apple ID’s like a lot of other people according to Apple, with one for my calendars, email etc ( primary ID )and one for itunes, movies etc. I was able to originally choose which ID to use for this apps subscription via the App log in page and used the iTunes one. However about a month into the subscription I updated the app only to find this no longer worked and I was told by the Guardian support page that I if I wanted to use the Subscription I would need to to change the Apple ID in my IOS Settings. This seemed very cumbersome. The support has been totally useless and I feel I have wasted a years subscription. I feel very let down and would not recommend this app for those who have more than one ID.

Only okay

There’s no undo button (frustrating if you want to keep your annotations but make a mistake on a sudoku) and the keyboard is frustrating because it’s smaller than the iPad one and harder to type on.

It’s also annoying to be asked to set up and pay a fairly hefty subscription to use the app, just to do the same crosswords and puzzles that you can play for free on the guardian website.

Apart from that the app is okay - it works but it’s definitely not worth paying to use beyond the free trial.