Stuff.co.nz 12+

As far as news and information curation apps go it’s not bad. It’s easy to use, and good use of sectional partitioning for articles on the mobile app (which is all that I use). But to be great it needs to have its users more front of mind. It seems obsessed with getting our eyeballs on to the adverts; be they videos that auto play for 15 secs before you can watch a ‘news’ related video, or a pop up ad. I wish it didn’t play me the same ad multiple times. 2 tops; but when I’m scrolling through articles and those articles include videos, the constant pushing of the same video to me is infuriating; not to mention I am forced to watch it. Why can’t you just give me an opt out of video ads for a fee. I’d happily pay $40 a year to not be assaulted by video ads. Lastly it is really clear the bias towards whether an article allows viewer comments. So many of the controversial political topics or opinion pieces written by people with a clear bias don’t allow for debate through comments. Every article should allow comments. But I’m nitpicking. I use Stuff daily so it passes the toothbrush test as a mobile app.

This app suffers the same problems as the website. There are so many little things that the developers have no done that make this app a waste of time... I liken the experience of using this app to a real world scenario where you are sitting at the tab”d reading the paper, but while you are reading page 3 some-one shuffles in pages from last Sunday’s paper and worse moves something from page 1 that you have read to page 4. It is eternally frustrating. 1) you have to open an article before you can bookmark it (you should be able to flick through the main page and mark articles of interest without opening them as you go (which is how the phone app works). 2). Articles persist in the main page days or weeks after you have read them - with no marker or indicator that they have been read. Worse still they reappear with a different title - so you open it only to find it is an article you read over a week ago. 3). Random rearranging of home screen. The home screen sometimes is rearranged, so when you return after reading an article - you have to start perusing the main page again just to find where you were up to. 4) articles do not have a date or time, some not even on the article, but ideally this should be on the main page.

C'mon stuff make the app stand out.

It’s super slow. Takes 7-10 seconds to load an article even on a newish iPhone 13, and then the same just to return to the home page! You get used to watching the S loading screen! It regularly fails to load articles and gives you those grey boxes forever. It freezes. It’s jerky. Fresh look but it’s less clear where you are. It doesn’t remember where you were like the old app. If you lose reception you now can’t read anything, where before it would show you what had loaded. On an iPhone 6, stories don’t load at all! though you can go look at it in Safari.. so 3 out of 4 grandparents now can’t use the app! Ads load late then bump the scroll down, as you tap an article and now you are loading something different to what you tapped. Scrolling behaviour is horrible as a result. Seems to heat up and chew battery on both an iPhone 13 and iPad 2018, where the old app was fine. Videos chop out of full screen if you change orientation. The quiz doesn’t present properly on iPad. Why the hell did anyone think the new app was a good idea? I can’t believe I’m saying this but I think the Herald is now a nicer reading experience. Can we have the old app back please?