Richmond Times Dispatch 12+

On a laptop the site works well. If you’re a paid subscriber and access it via the email links you still have to login, hence a 3 rating as it works but not great. Clearly the RTD organization is attempting to embrace the digital age, but have not learned to listen to and make digital functional improvements. It will be interesting to see if they can do it in time to survive.

The app is pretty much a porting of the RTD website to a local app. The layout is very poor and, like the website, finding the articles between the advertisements is sometimes a challenge.

Overall, I’m not impressed and would rather view the RTD web over the app. The only saving grace is that you can get notifications of breaking stories. But you can get the same by setting up RSS on the RTD website.

A few things that would greatly improve the app... 1) add the ability to link subscription to the app which reduces the number of distracting advertisements. (This would also be needed for #3.) 2) review the design of the GUI on smaller screens, it seems the development team either doesn’t understand the iOS system or didn’t bother to test on different sized screens. 3) add e-edition viewer directly to the app instead of porting the web version and along with this, allow automatic downloading of the e-edition to the device.

There is seriously no explanation on their website on how to cancel your subscription and after calling customer service, that’s the only way to do it. In my mind that’s making it PURPOSEFULLY difficult. And all the ads on the app. I get newspapers need money but don’t be car salesmen about it, especially when I’m a paying customer Update: they called me several times after cancelling. I blocked their number and they called from a different phone number. Do NOT sign a subscription with this company. It’s not worth it