AOPA Mags 4+

I installed this on a brand-new iPad air 2 that is a week old and completely up-to-date on maintenance as of December 2015. I do have A digital subscription. I called AOPA and their support was no help whatsoever. Another company develops and maintains the app and there is no way to get in touch with them. AOPA said they would forward my issue on to the developers but cannot promise that this issue will be addressed at all. They declined my request to be put in touch with the developers directly.

I'm updating this a few days later and I've increased my rating. The problem I was having was because I was using my default password is the same as my AOPA password. The problem is the AOPA a site allows special characters and the app does not in the password. I changed my AOPA password to not have special characters and everything was fine.

It is a much needed improvement. It's amazing how something as simple as bookmarking your place automatically can be such a great change.

I gave four stars because it takes a long time to load the app as it cycles between loading the catalog and loading book a few times. This is a minor thing.

If you have patience, a fast network connection, a fast device, and not much ambition, this app may meet your expectations. Otherwise, not so much.

The start-up Catalog and Issues page can take a few minutes to load, even on a 250Mb/s network connection, and you can't do anything while it's loading, even if you're only interested in looking at one magazine. If you're on a mobile network with a data cap, watch out - it'll burn a lot of megabytes loading stuff.

If you have a slower device, you'll always see a blurry, unreadable version of every page which will eventually clear up after significant delay. Even on fast devices, it's 'blur first', just more quickly replaced by a crisper version - which gets fuzzy again if you zoom in on it (and won't clear up then.)

Although the app is all about looking at text and pictures, they cannot be selected - no text or image copy is possible, so forget about sending that interesting paragraph or photo in email to your friends.

To keep life interesting, the app will occasionally crash or refuse to run when iOS gets updated, or sometimes randomly when it isn't.

In short - this is not a web browser, a PDF previewer, or anything like that - it's a slow, poorly-implemented picture gallery view of the magazines.

Yes, it's an improvement over dead trees...