Flipboard: The Social Magazine 12+

Beautiful program for reading information from on-line. It’s in my top 5 most used iPad apps!!!!

If you have not tried this app, you must try it out!

It's very graphical and pretty on my retina iPad and my 12.9” iPad Pro. Generally works very smoothly. Could cache the data a little better / faster, I've got fast internet at home, but sometimes it's slow updating and if I just spent a while reading the last entry, seems like it could read ahead a little bit, it could make the experiences so much better...

BUT be careful if you have a cellular connection! FlipBoard (being so graphical and beautiful) is a HUGE a data hog (assuming you're viewing something graphical and not text) so if you're on a low data plan be careful. I used over 10% of my 250MB data plan in less than 5 minutes (I tested this again at the end of this month, just a few minutes and 50MB of data was gone!). This is NOT a flaw, it's just the way super graphical apps are, but it goes SO fast I wanted to point it out.

Because of the retina display it "shrinks" some graphics too small (like animated GIFs in Tumblr pages) and it's too hard to read. Needs some user adjustment on that (what size to shrink to retina proportions) and to size text. It shrinks things WAY too far on the iPad Pro.

It’s got a great search option that searches a variety of sources all at once.

I don't think it's as useful on the iPhone for browsing, maybe if you went to a specific section, but I'm still not sold on that yet...

“Comments”

Flipboard is great. However...they may want address how many user comments are legitimate thoughts written by actual readers. Many comments connected to articles appear to be written by users with little or no flips, likes, or magazines...perhaps indicating no real investment into the app or no desire to actually read articles...they only want a venue to
help foster disagreements. Many of these comments look purposely incendiary. Considering that many of these articles go on to be posted on Facebook or Twitter, Flipboard may want to do its part to curb bots and “fake news” and encourage legitimate discussion rather than fostering division. Commenters who actually have flips or magazines are few and far between, indicating an overwhelming number of commenters are not real accounts. Flipboard, please solve this, you have a responsibility to NOT contribute to division.

Addition: The comments are now even more prevalent and, if you can believe this, more negative and divisive from both sides. These commenters haven’t even read the articles! It’s ridiculous! These are definitely bots or trolls meant to drive up anger. Flipboard replied to my last review that I could “report” these users. Are you kidding me!?!? I’d have to report ALL of them on every article. How is this responsible of you as a company?!?! What are you doing to curb this besides putting it on the onus of your legit users to “report” every single fake user?!?!

Developer Response ,

Thank you for the feedback! We want Flipboard to be safe and enjoyable for everyone. If you ever come across inappropriate comments on Flipboard, please use the Report feature to let us know. We monitor reports daily against our community guidelines. For help, go to Settings, Help & Feedback, Contact Support, then Contact Us.