Australian Financial Review 4+

The app ‘upgrade’ a few weeks ago seems to have reduced its functionality. In particular, if you leave the app, it no longer remembers which page you were on in Today’s Paper (or even which edition), which means constantly having to flip through pages or scroll through the contents to find where you were up to (if you can even remember). It’s now also difficult to see which editions you’ve downloaded, so you can be left without access to Today’s Paper if you’re off wifi or mobile access. In the previous version, it was clear from the blue highlighting where you should click to get a plain text version of an article - now I seem to accidentally click on invisible hyperlinks all the time.
The old version of the app was far from perfect, but this latest version feels like it has gone backwards. As an avid reader of the AFR and daily user of the app, it’s become very frustrating!

I have been so totally spoilt by the SMH and The Age apps for iPad , so not having the ability to tap on an article and read it in text mode is a major access flaw in this app, having to enlarge by dragging is not a good enough experience, especially for a premium priced app.

Next, whilst the app is fine, again unlike the SMH or Age app, there is no access available to the web version... it’s says not a subscriber and in contacting AFR support, they say they can’t see the subscription because it comes out of Apple... this is totally weird and very unsatisfactory customer experience

Can do a lot better, people

While I greatly enjoy the articles using the app on the iPhone is somewhat lacking. It does not remember read articles: many times I read articles which are the marked grey, only to later on be marked back to unread. This makes it hard to make sure I’ve read it all. Secondly, I can’t seem to find a way to save the articles? Lastly it would be really great if there was a sync between the web site and the app. For example, I will read some articles on my PAC during lunch at work, and catch up on the app in the afternoon. Wouldn’t it be great if the read articles would be marked as such on the app. Other than that, not too bad.