Slate.com 4+

I enjoy reading Slate very much. Sadly I am going to disable the app because you won’t let me read it unless I pay. It started with Slate+ being the gateway to much of Dear Prudence and ended today when you gave me notice I had read all the free articles I could without subscribing and you shut me off. My question is: if I need to pay to read, what do you do with all the advertising dollars you must generate because there are ads everywhere? Just like many other current sources, I’m asked to pay and then wade through many, many ads to find the pieces of the article. I’m not paying them either. And I’m not paying to play games, nor do I pay to watch cable TV for $150 a month and still put up with ads everywhere. It just bothers me about you more than the others because I enjoy Slate—your writers are fantastic, the content is always interesting and compelling, and the satire suits me perfectly. I even buy things from some of the advertisers paying you to be present everywhere in Slate. It’s a shame that now you have closed the door to me unless I pay, too.

I have had and enjoyed the slate app for probably about a year now. It’s a far better mobile reading experience than browser, despite some bugs and the fact that the entire backlog of content is too large for the app. However, the most recent update has left me at the end of my rope. I have slate plus, and the app does not remember that I have logged in. Annoying, but I use a password manager. What pushes this from annoyance to unacceptable is that in order to log back in (after it auto logs me out every time the app closes), I have to uninstall and reinstall because the login page will not display correctly. To be clear, the slate plus login page will only load the first time I open it after a fresh installation. It will not load under any other circumstance. In practice, this means that I must uninstall and reinstall the app every single day to read new articles (I read far more articles than the monthly free limit allows, hence purchasing slate plus). I admittedly have a decently old iPhone (iphone 7) but my iOS is up to date and I have never had this issue with other apps. I have not been able to find a way to contact the app developers about this issue, but hopefully you will see this review and address this extraordinarily annoying problem.

I’ve been a fan of Slate’s content for many years and I’ve thought of them as an essential voice in the American media landscape, so when they started Slate Plus, I signed on and downloaded their app. Prior to that I had just used Apple podcasts. Their app is very weak, to the point where it significantly degrades my enjoyment of their content. It does not effectively attach to the native services of the iOS operating system, so when it’s playing audio and you want to switch to playing music, the Slate audio does not stop. Similarly, if you pause it and then unpause it using external audio controls, via Bluetooth, it doesn’t restart. Now, for the last two weeks in a row, my FAVORITE podcast of all, the Political Gabfest keeps pausing itself every two minutes or so and has to be restarted manually, which requires unlocking the phone and navigating down two levels in the menu structure (again, it does not play well with iOS). So much for listening to it while you cook dinner. The overall performance of the app is very slow and it does not support downloading podcasts in advance so you can listen to them offline. The fact that I’ve had to go back to Apple’s lackluster podcast app would tell you my standards for ease of use are low, but Slate’s app doesn’t meet them.