NPR 4+

This app is unfortunately a hot mess. I’m a two decade NPR listener. I appreciate going through the daily news stories and building a playlist to listen to throughout the day. Unbelievably they merged the old NPR app which did this fairly well with the NPR One app which is a complete mess of shows, podcasts and ads, without key features like being able to manually sort the playlist. Thankfully that feature has now returned and slow improvements are being made (however if you listen to NPR podcasts I would highly recommend you do it in a dedicated podcast app rather than here).

Suggestions for future updates: 1) a Playlist button in the interface, not hidden 3-4 clicks away. There’s plenty of space at the bottom for one extra button and it’s very annoying to have to click multiple times just to get to it 2) the ability to turn off the annoying ticker at the bottom which shows what you watched previously. Just an X at the end would suffice. It is very annoying. 3) The ability to pin the shows that I like at the top of the Podcasts page instead of having them constantly change because you think you know what I want at different times of the day (which you don’t!) 4)Why do I get audio ads in my playlist? I’m a member of NPR/ PBS

I should have known better than to go with the new NPR app that replaced NPR News. There was so much to love about it. Although I do Support my local NPR Station, I also like to browse, including locally produced programs from other parts of the country, which are not carried by my local station. That was easy to do in the old app. I simply brought up the station, and chose an on-demand program. These shows were displayed alongside the live streams. In addition , I could create a Favorites list, and even add items to a playlist for later use. In the new version, all of these features are gone. Now, the only way to get on-demand material from other stations seems to involve changing one’s favorite station; and, even if you do that, you then have to go to a separate On-Demand tab to get such material, and there are fewer choices of podcasts and topics. For instance, on the old app, I could go to WUNC (not my local station), and listen to podcasts from The People’s Pharmacy. Now, even by making that station my favorite, I found very few choices—and The People’s Pharmacy wasn’t one of them. Then, I had to reset my favorite station; then, to get back to where I was (if it wasn’t my local station), I had to go to Recently Streamed, and _hope to find it there. I hope I will grow to like the new app better, but don’t count on it. The reason I even gave it 4 stars is that I’m a huge fan of NPR.

The new NPR app seems designed like the NPR One app, which is really unfortunate. On the old NPR News app, I could create my own playlists, listening to these three stories but not that one. That functionality has all been removed from the new (and certainly not improved) NPR app. Sometimes I might want to listen to most of one day’s All Things Considered program, but would (for example) delete the sports stories because I just don’t care about them. With the change to this new NPR app, it’s not possible to curate my own NPR playlist. It’s frustrating that NPR’s “digital” department thinks that this is what their listeners want.

The new NPR app is much less listener-friendly and makes it more difficult to seek out new/interesting content. It is still easy to find Morning Edition or All Things Considered—but it is very difficult to find the off-the-wall and obscure programs produced by smaller NPR member stations across the country. The old NPR News app was great for that.

Ugh. I gave up on using NPR One years ago because I didn’t like how that program “decided” for me what it thought I would want to listen to. I was an active user of the NPR News app for years and years. I used the Playlist feature on a daily basis. It was a very frustrating morning to be forced into using this new NPR app that has taken away much of the functionality of the old NPR News app. Please bring the old NPR News app back!