Foreign Affairs Magazine 4+

Questionable Update

It looks like this update was intended to allow dynamic content and consequently the ability to use with an iPhone. What I appreciated about the old app was that it was simply digital/ePub versions of the print magazine, and therefore replicated the experience of flipping through the pages but with the added portability of having your entire collection available on the plane or a train.

One (presumably unintended) consequence of the change in the display engine is that all the subscriber special editions are no longer available, at least as far as I could find. One has to now go to the FA website and download them from there.

Many people are having trouble with validating subscriptions. This has also been a problem with previous versions of this app. I did not personally experience it this time, but understand how frustrating it is having experienced it before.

I, for one, would appreciate the ability to retain the option to read ePub versions of the issues (and keep the subscriber specials), even as a separate option within the app.

Bottom line, Foreign Affairs is a world-class publication and ought to have a world class app. It’s not quite there yet.

Réponse du développeur ,

Thank you for your review. We have now added all of the past subscriber special editions as a PDF/ePub versions.

Great content, good features, OK app

The Foreign Affairs Magazine name for this app is an understatement. The content includes everything in the magazine plus a variety of additional articles plus audio (read) versions of many of the articles. New content shows up daily. Most people will likely pick and choose what to read.

The app is OK when it works. The organization of the articles is great. It's servicable. You can save articles and read them offline (great for travel). The formatting is pretty easy to read on iPhones and iPads.

When it doesn't work... Well I don't know. I had a problem that compleatly disabled everything on my iPad. No articles. No content. Just a blank framework of the app. Though I reached out to support and they were helpful, and though we tried many things, we could not get it to work. Then I broke my iPad, replaced it with a newer model, loaded that up from my backup and everything worked fine. Lesson, if you can't get it to work, get a new iPad.

Good but can be better

Update 2: The “The Latest” section started working again. Also, I appreciate customer support getting back to me.
Update: app’s been pretty buggy lately. The “The latest” section doesn’t load. Overall, the app is pretty good and the content is great. It would be really nice if saved articles don’t just save locally. I constantly switch between my devices (iPhone, ipad) and none of my saved articles appear on the other devices. Also, it would be nice if the app had the ability to download articles in the background so it starts up faster and does not do the updating when I launch the app. If I’m mistaken in any of this and the app does, indeed, do those things, then please let me know.

Réponse du développeur ,

Thank you for your feedback! We are always looking for ways to improve the app, and the Saved articles functionality is something we'd like to be better at. There should not however be any updating needed when opening the app. Please contact us at support@ForeignAffairs.com if this is still something you are experiencing. Thank you again for taking the time to share your review, and for your readership.