The poor rating is for the new app, that forces me to answer filtering questions and queues up videos to auto start after I finish a video. I have used the TED app since it came out on my first iPhone, years ago. What I most appreciated was the chaotic combination of topics that were always showing up, with no theme holding them together other than combining Technology, Entertainment, and Design. What I valued most was the juxtaposition of wildly differing topics — I don’t want filtering and categorization and I don’t want a TED account, I just want the flood of wildly different topics that characterized the experience in the past. Please provide a way to bypass the filter questions and categorized presentations and just go back to the timeline presentation of topics as they are added to the flow. On top of sticking questions I don’t want to answer in the flow of using the app, at a recent update it lost the results and made me answer them again. Bad programming producing a poor user experience. I was about to give two stars, since that is all the app should get, but it is hard to ignore the fact that the content is still very high quality.
Thank you very much for your candid feedback. With regard to signing in on the app, it's actually already possible to bypass it. After answering the TED Recommends questions, you can choose "Skip this" on the login screen to use the app without an account. That said, your watch history, saved talks and favorites will be vulnerable to loss if you change devices or delete the app. We encourage signing in to an account to allow the carryover of saved data between devices or syncing across platforms. As you note, the "infinite scroll" feed that showed all recent talks has been revamped in the new version to better align with the "homepage" of the app with the homepage of TED.com. Our rationale is to make our content "ribbons" identical on all platforms. This is also partly meant to balance the viewing options for viewers who are more inclined to want content recommended to them, or surfaced based on certain interests. For more adventurous viewers like you, the most recent 12 talks appear in reverse chronological order in the Newest Talks ribbon, and the Surprise Me feature will generate a random talk to perhaps satisfy your desire to see a wildly differing topic each time.With that said, forthcoming releases will have many enhancements to how content will be shown in the app, including a holistic library to make random browsing more easy. Thank you again for your feedback!
