National Review 4+

I received an NRPlus subscription (purchased on their website) as a gift, but couldn’t login to the website or this app. I sent emails that went unanswered. I made a phone call that got me an emailed password that didn’t work. I called again and finally got someone who could reset my account and give me access. On a positive note, they extended my subscription by a month to account for the month I was locked out.

The app is simple and works well 99% of the time. On a few occasions I’ve switched between topic tabs and had the app refuse to load headlines, but closing the app and relaunching it has fixed that. Otherwise it just works.

There’s one major annoyance that I wish NR’s developer would fix: if you want offline acces to stories (eg. if you’ll be flying and won’t have Wi-Fi) you have to load each story one by one, then the app will store the text.

They really should add a button to download the text and images for all new content — and yes, probably also the ads that litter every story — so I can update the app in a few seconds instead of the several minutes that it takes now.

Speaking of the content, National Review’s is top notch. If you want to read news reported as facts without a leftist bias, and you want to read opinion from a classical conservative perspective, then NR is the place to go. An NR subscription isn’t cheap, but it’s well worth the price.

If you subscribed by way of the website good luck trying to log into the mobile apps. I have an NRPlus subscription but have yet been able to log into the mobile apps despite a month of emails, phone calls, password resets, etc. The app login for subscriptions not made in the app itself is broken, and has been, apparently, for quite some time. National Review publishers have passed off the app maintenance and customer service to a lousy 3rd-party service and have neglected to keep proper oversight....or simply don’t care.

Nope. An apparent fix lasted all of a week. All articles again randomly crash in a white screen. The user can only go back to the home screen, find the article they were reading again, then try to scroll back to where they left off reading. It may happen 2 or 3 more times when trying to get through a longer article.

I had theorized that it was caused by script issues with their ads but who knows. They had seemed to completely fix it for a week or two in December 2017 but it is back to being nearly unusable.

I still give 3 stars because of course the content is excellent and impossible to find elsewhere curated all in one place. It is worth some frustration, but this is sisyphean.