KARE 11 Minneapolis-St. Paul 4+

We watch Kare11 exclusively… we’ve tried watching other News on other stations but have been very disappointed with them. Even when we are visiting our grown children in Waukesha or Neenah… the quality of the reporting or weather has a lot to be desired! KARE 11 is the ultimate in programs, whether it’s the Saturday Morning Program, weather, news, sports, and all the personal…Belinda…Laura…Bobby…Dave…Randy…Reggie…Mace…Jana…Rena…Julie…Ben…and all the other reporters… new & old!!! Fantastic coverage of News…Weather & Sports!!!

Slow to start up ... splashes a pretty “good morning” or “good afternoon” greeting across while it starts, but we all know it’s just masking a slow startup. The wait is just long enough to still be annoying.

Occasionally crashes or scrolls glitchily and jumps all over the place. C’mon guys ... news apps are just controlled-environment browsers. How hard can this be to display a story with some pics and-or video? Maybe not give your advertisers the ability to write their own JavaScript ads that tweak out the app?

Finally, this suffers from my main beef with most news apps: disabling the ability to zoom in on pictures. I remember vividly the day I first used a smartphone, and the seeming miracle of being able to use two fingers to zoom in on a web page. That was the magic. The web was only barely useable on web-capable phones prior to that. Now we have pages and apps that are optimized for mobile use, which we didn’t have then, but we STILL NEED to be able to zoom pics, especially stuff like infographics. There’s no technical reason apps can’t allow this like most web pages do in a generic browser. Let phones do what they’re supposed to be able to do, and stop stealing the magic.

Still 3 stars because I can basically get the news, but as a news app it is mediocre at best.

Each iteration of this app has new problems. It’s just not good from a user experience perspective, or performance. For example, why make me scroll through the articles with giant pictures? And, if you’re going to do that (which my husband actually likes), then at least have the app not randomly jump back to the top of the page while I’m looking at headlines. I watch kare11 as my normal news source but your app blows.

And, some of the ads and clickbait are extremely inappropriate. I know the news isn’t always “family friendly” but you don’t have to this type of advertising in.