National Geographic 12+

My exposure to nature’s mysteries, other peoples, and exploration of current issues

So good. The photos, of course, are amazing, and the writers bring you right in to what they experience with verbal elegance, do pleasing to see and “hear”. The pictures and stories take me all over the world and up close. NatGeo has me running a race in the wintry cold with top runners in the Himalayas, journeying along an important river in India and seeing its critical water issues, and feeling excited at the amazing cutting-edge agricultural techniques in the Netherlands that give hope to the capacity to feed millions with so little land. My experience and awareness is expanded through the app and the monthly issue, which I think is worth the $2.99/month to subscribe.

Some improvements but still slow

Updating to 3 stars. Finally I was able to reach someone that suggested deleting the app. But that didn’t work. Then it seemed they perhaps had some issues on the back end of the system (nothing to do with my app). Now downloads seem to work as well as reading offline. Not giving higher than 3 starts because the app is still very slow.
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Zero Stars!!! It’s been years since my first review of this app and it’s still broken. Nothing gets fixed. They say the Downloading is now enabled, but it’s clearly broken. It fails when trying to download, then the item gets stuck in the Library and your can’t remove it even though it isn’t bookmarked as a saved item. The only way to purge it is to delete the app and start all over. One brief time I was able to download an article, then while traveling and not on WiFi, the article wasn’t available. So why is there a download option if you can’t read it offline? Maybe I’m missing the purpose of the download option. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling the app per NatGeo’s support team recommendation, only to loose all my bookmarked items. Then the problem persisted. They or their developer clearly have no clue as to what is wrong with this app, nor do they care about fixing it. If they did, these issues would not be languishing for the past several years. The original apps was great — could download issues, read offline — then this new app came along and all went sideways if not backwards.

Developer Response ,

Hi there! Thanks for your review. If you're seeing any issues with the app's performance, then we recommend reaching out to our Customer Support team:  ngp.appsupport@natgeo.com

Takes forever to open & load articles

Prior to Disney, this app was great. It was fast & I never had an issue linking my subscription. Once Disney took over the app quality went down immensely. It takes minutes for the app to just open the homepage. Once the homepage finally loads, I’m rarely able to get any articles to open. It’s unbelievably slow. The same issues occur when I open an article from a Nat Geo email on my phone & it prompts the app. When I’m lucky enough to get an article to load, the app often crashes/closes without warning…. Then I have to start the 5 minute process of restarting the app & opening the article again. This is really unacceptable when Nat Geo is now owned by the largest company on the planet.

Not to mention the issues I had linking my subscription right after Disney took over. It took 2 months & multiple phone calls to customer service to get it fixed. Again… this is the quality product/service we get from the largest company on Earth?

My local news apps work far better than Nat Geo & have a fraction of the financial backing.

Developer Response ,

Hi there! Thanks for your review. If you're seeing any issues with the app's performance, we recommend reaching out to our Technical Support team at ngp.appsupport@natgeo.com.