The Garden Island News 4+

I really like the print replica way of viewing the newspaper. So much easier to scroll the paper to desired articles and skim over less desirable areas. It’s a little quirky with iPhone and jumps around when zooming in and out which can be hard to deal with. But the print replica is crucial for me.

I have used this app for several years and found it to be an outstanding way to keep-up with news about The Garden Island. However, the developers released a major revision a few weeks ago that has dropped my rating from 5-star to 2-star.

The main reasons for my displeasure with the newest version:
1. "Local news" now includes stories from all the islands it seems, and there is no obvious way to select only stories relating to Kauai. Previously, all the stories related to Kauai only with an occasional non-Kauai story. Makes The Garden Island newspaper just seem like a poor-man's version of the Honolulu Star-Advertiser!

2. Layout is much busier and more confusing than previous versions even though one can easily switch between a list view and a tile view.

3. I urge TGI to consider offering different options to charge for reading full news stories on this app rather than relying on a fixed subscription model. A low cost per story or per day charge would I believe produce a good model and good income for TGI.

Please make the app Kauai-focused once again to keep me using this app!

I’ve had the app for many years. I like the slow crescendo of the selected alarm tone. The big flaw is that the alarm will randomly not sound. The screen shows the alarm, but no sound! At first I thought it related to Bluetooth connectivity. After checking that my phone is not connected to any Bluetooth devices except my Apple Watch many times, the random silence still occurs. I adopted a routine of rebooting my iPhone and restarting the app every night before going to sleep. This seems to help. I also have a backup alarm with the iPhone phone app. A silent wake up alarm has caused issues getting to work on time.

Solve the random silence and this is a 4-5 ⭐️app.