The CW 12+

Overall I like the app. I get that contracts limit to the last 5 episodes, though in the modern age of episodic TV having fall finales I wish they would release the early season episodes to streaming services in smaller chunks to let us get caught up and finish the show on the app.

However my first complaint / reason for a drop of a star is that unlike other streaming apps, this one maintains the main iOS screen saver settings. When I use my phone normally I want it to lock automatically after a short period of me not touching it ... but if I’m watching an hour long show casted to my TV I don’t want to touch my phone for an hour, and definitely not every 2 minutes.
Also, either the setting to go from one episode to the next doesn’t exist or it isn’t obvious / intuitive. Other streaming apps auto-forward too quickly (I sometimes like the music and some movies have post-credit scenes), but to not have the option to skip to next or automatically advance at the end also seems outdated.
Other streaming video apps have these issues figured out, more or less, and they seem tome to be things that need to be priorities.

This app is incomprehensibly bad, at least as far as how it displays when holding the iPad in different orientations. For starters, when you open the app, it only supports portrait orientation, with the home button at the bottom. Now let’s be clear about something. We are watching a video, the only way to watch it is in landscape orientation. And that is exactly how the videos will play, but before you can watch them, you have to browse the selection screen with iPad held upright in portrait orientation. That is incomprehensibly ridiculous. Why wouldn’t you want to browse the listings in the same orientation as you are going to watch them in? As it is, the iPad is often easier to hold in landscape orientation. And it’s not like there isn’t an existing CW app that is used exclusively in landscape orientation. Hello Apple TV!

But this gets better. Sometimes I have to have my iPad in landscape orientation with the home button on the left side, so I can have it plugged in while I’m watching something. And while the actual videos “can” play oriented correctly regardless of which side is up, when you pause a video, it will resume upside down if your iPad is held (or on a stand in my case) with the home button is on the left. And of course, when you exit a video, the home screen for the app is sideways.

You would think the developers of The CW app have not actually used it themselves. It’s just that incomprehensibly absurd in the way it works.

It’s wild that such a large wealthy company can have such a crappy app. The constant buffering brings me back to my 2002 dial up internet days. I guess I should be grateful the app doesn't include that screeching dial up noise. Oh, speaking of noise… the commercials are significantly louder than the show, so I have to mute them if I don’t want to play the up-down game every 5 minutes. If I try to leave the volume at a happy medium so the commercials are more bearable, I can barely hear the dialogue of the actual show. But wait, there’s more! The closed captioning is out of synch, sometimes by several minutes, so it’s no help at all in trying to catch what the characters are saying while keeping the volume low enough to avoid being startled by the extremely loud commercials or even the in-show music. Did I mention that the music in the actual show is also super loud? So I’ll have it turned up high so I can hear the dialog, then it cuts to a scene in a nightclub and I have to scramble to grab the remote to turn it back down to a reasonable level, but then the next scene is dialog so I have to turn it back up again. The whole point of watching tv shows is to relax and chill, but trying to watch anything on CW is just exhausting and frustrating. Sigh. At least it’s free.