The New Yorker

The app satisfies on most fronts. I can comfortably read shorter articles, search through the archive and save stories to my library, listen to incredible voice actors narrate longer pieces, and mindlessly (but enjoyably) flick through an endless digital stack of cartoons. There are three main features that would greatly improve my experience: 1. Narrated articles from the archive. The voice actors who narrate the articles are outstanding. However, the practice of providing articles read aloud seems to only go back to 2018 or so. That’s a lot of the archive left unvocalized. My preference would be to have voice actors read at least some of the more major/famous stories. Alternatively, the use of synthetic voices could provide a way to make older stories accessible in a different format. 2. Allow saving articles to reading lists, not just a single library. I comb through the archive quite a bit. As a result, I’ve saved a lot of articles to my library. Right now it’s especially hard to scroll through all my saved stories. It’d be really great to have some library folder structure to organize the content I find and save. 3. Better browsing by topic/author. There have been countless times where I read someone in the magazine, really liked what they wrote, and want to see all their contributions. On the web, this is really easy. It’s much clunkier in the app. Having collections based on topics or themes to better surface stories from the archive would also be nice.

Now that I can actually scroll through an issue in the right order, this app at least now has most of what I needed from the old one that they just silently killed. It's still kind of a shame that I'm basically reading an embedded browser view rather than something that actually looks like the magazine (all text with ads as interstitials between articles). And I still don't understand at all why there's no feature to see all the cartoons in an issue. For now, the old app still works on my phone (but not my tablet), so I've been using that to look at all the cartoons after I finish an issue. I've noticed that when this app gets backgrounded on my phone, if it's unloaded from memory, it'll show me a blank screen instead of the article I was on. The only way to get back to the article is to exit to the table of contents and go back in, but this loses my place. I tried to report this bug via the help email, and was first given instructions on how to log in and then told to contact Apple Support. It's amazing how impossible it is to successfully report bugs on this app, which doesn't give me any confidence that it'll improve. It's really a shame because I enjoy the content of the New Yorker and had been using the old app as my primary way of reading for the five years I've been a subscriber. Sadly, the old NYer Print app crashes on my iPad. The constant annoyances on the new app really make me wonder if it's worth dealing with sometimes. I shouldn't be paying the subscriber rate just to be annoyed.

Longtime print - online subscriber and reader here. Was pleased that with prior “print edition” app i could download AND SAVE issues to view on a large-screen ipad, or a mini for airplane reading. After a forced app upgrade years ago, all my saved full issues deleted, had to redownload each and every one. On a rural connection DSL it takes a minute per issue and mind numbing icon stroking and scrolling. July 2022, again, the app is upgraded, all my saved issues are not ported to the upgraded app. I got to a google-fiber wifi to download issues, all over again. (Edited) at first it looked like i could only download current year issues. Then i went back and noticed a “year” scroll menu (top right, then bottom) to allow prior-year issue download. Back to 2008. So, next app upgrade, will CN continue to refresh archives, or will the old bits just vanish? Twice, issues were not imported in the app upgrade. Remember, readers. Your online media are ephemeral. If you value the content, save the print edition, because CondeNaste may or may not continue to refresh any paid-for archive of digital content. Fortunately, my “saved articles” list, which was initially blank after the upgrade, reappeared after a minute or two- i think it is intact?. So, rating: content quality, 5 stars. Delivery and loss of archives, zero stars. Old issues have been deleted twice, now.