San Francisco Chronicle 12+

Since our daughter lives overseas, we have joined her for a couple of months to reconnect in the waning (we hope!) days of the pandemic. It has been very comforting to stay abreast of the news both nationally as well as in the Bay Area. As an older person I love having the option to flip through the paper page-by-page as through I was sitting in my wing chair back in the Bay Area. It helps both of us feel connected to both friends and family on both sides of the world. Having the daily news sourced both locally and from SF gives us a broader perspective of world event.

I’m a Bay Area native, but currently live out of state. I still enjoy keeping up with Bay Area news and sports, and the app generally works fine for that. However, I’ve found it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription after the promotional offer is up. There is no way to cancel a digital sub without a phone call, and the number only stays open until 2:30 pm PT. And when you do call, no one answers. It is easier to get ahold of your state Unemployment Dep’t! I sent an email to complain, and the reply was filled with lies and false information on how to cancel using a web browser - which does not even give the option. Despite all my efforts to cancel, my sub is still active. This is obviously the intent of corrupt management to make it as hard to cancel as possible. I finally had to call my credit card to block future charges, and might even have to close the card to guarantee it won’t be charged again. These types of unethical and fraudulent business practices should not be allowed on the app store!

Frustrations:

- When you are midway through an article, switch to another app, then return to the article, more often then not it will return to the top of the article, loosing your current scroll position.

- The Navigation Controller implementation is optimized for iterating through each article that is available. The normal apple design pattern of swipe from the left to return to the parent view controller is not used, instead, swiping from the left goes to the previous article (and accordingly, swiping from the right takes you to the next article). I truly hate this behavior because I find maybe 1 in 4 articles worth reading, and back out to the main article feed far more often than seeking to the next article.