AJC News 4+

Need for newspapers

The AJC with it’s stable of reporters does a stellar job keeping metro Atlanta informed. News papers do the work and have the space to report local government business, along with in-depth and investigative stories that need to be told. It appears today’s editors have followed in the footsteps of the bold men and women before them. Relying on cable news is only half the information with newspapers filling in the gaps providing a levity and time for reflection
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Developer Response ,

Thank you for taking the time to provide a review.

App Broken

Like others have said, it’s impossible to scroll down on the main feed to read more stories because the app will automatically jump back to the top of the page every 5-6 seconds. It makes it impossible to use and I’ve stopped reading the AJC as a result. Since there’s no search function there’s no other way to find articles.

It is also impossible to access the sports section in the app, because none of the choices in the top menu bar are for sports. That is really annoying because AJC publishes a ton of good articles about the Braves and I’m unable to even access them through the app.

Articles in the app are also limited to those published in the last few days. If I miss a notification about an article I want to read and click on it several days later, it will tell me the article is no longer available. You’d find the same thing if you were able to successfully scroll down all the way to the bottom of each news category. I’ve never seen this happen for any other news app, or at least not with such a limited time frame of articles included.

Finally, most apps now have a dark mode, but this one doesn’t. That feature would be greatly appreciated.

I know there is also the ePaper app and I have also used that in the past, but that app is also filled with its own problems (some of which are the same) and isn’t really a replacement on iPhones, particularly my iPhone 13 mini.

Good but needs improving

The app is much better than it was over the past few years but it needs improvements to ease of access. A big step would be making it easier to access different sections. For example I have to scroll quite a bit to get to the sports section, then scroll vertically to pick between different Atlanta teams. I would at least like a button at the top of the Home Screen that displays a vertical list of major sections.

If at all helpful, I believe the best newspaper app is the New York Times’. Following their lead on UI and UX could be a good strategy to continue building the app.