The Economist - News, Podcasts App Reviews

Great content, but kind of amazing the app can be this bad. Amazing how many bugs there can be in an app from the journalistic giant The Economist. To take a glaring example, try the back and forward articles buttons. The back button takes you to the previous article rather than the start of the current article, which is weird enough. But completely frustrating is the fact that using the forward button after the back button will first skip to the next article, then the next next article, then to the next next next article. It is actually impossible to listen to the Economist on headphones and page back and forth on articles (e.g. after getting distracted by something) with these limitations. Ideally you’d do what all other magazine apps do and just skip back and forth by 30s at a time, but at the very least don’t make it completely broken.

Functionality lacking. As a reader/subscriber for over 30 years, I am disappointed and dismayed by the lack of functionality of this Economist app, and the tech generally. If I am reading an article on my iPad in the app and I want to check something else before finishing the article and navigate away, when I return, I’m seeing the home page and I have to search for the article I was reading. Not only does it not return to what I was reading, there is not even a “history” I can use to find it. This is basic functionality. Also, if I attempt to share the article to my MacBook Pro, it shares a text url instead of opening in my default browser like well crafted news reader apps do. Get with it, Economist! Just because you’re old, doesn’t mean you can get away with being primitive!

Much worse than the Legacy app. For months, the Legacy app has been inviting me to download this app. I always resisted (when I had tried, several years ago, the app didn’t allow me to download the weekly edition. I’m not making this up.). They finally forced me to switch. And guess what? I am trying to download the latest issue, to read it on the road (where I have no WiFi), and THE DOWNLOAD DOES NOT EVEN START. I tried everything: quitting the app, switching the iPad off, checking I have enough space… nothing worked. I complained a month ago, and I still have received neither an answer nor an explanation. (To be clear: I can download apps. I can watch videos. I can download large files. The only thing I cannot do is download the print edition on Thursday to read it on my way back home. I complained a month ago and got no answer.) Meanwhile, The Economist just told me the suscription price is going up because of a lot of content I am not interested in. After well over a decade as a suscriber, I am seriously considering to cancel.

App quality is deteriorating fast. I have been a print subscriber to the Economist for 15+ years. Many years ago I switched over to fully digital when the app matured, the app being my preferred way to consume the content. I hate to say it but the app is declining in quality. UX often gets sluggish, random crashes are becoming a thing, the edition download has become less functional and the audio overlay interrupts with other phone audio. It appears The Economist is starting to cut back on internal support for the app, and it’s beginning to reflect on the quality of it. The poor quality edition download means I can’t use it fully on long flights with no WiFi as I’m used to. The other issues just reflect poorly on a premium news outlet like this. I hope they listen and fix the issues, and ideally get rid of the stupid audio blocking. If I stop reading the app because of these problems then I’ll stop my subscription with it.

Audio edition unusable. Excellent content, terrible app. I use the app (and subscribe to The Economist) solely to listen to the audio edition. Usually I listen while doing something else: driving, riding a motorcycle, in the gym, on an airplane, etc. Usually I am also using other apps such as for navigation , and often with no or intermittent internet access. In older versions of the app, this was not a problem. There is an option to download the audio file and play it back through the app. However, updates over the past year have made this feature virtually unusable. Often it will randomly stop playing, and I need to pull over, restart the app (which restarts from the beginning of the edition) and then advance it to the right article. Sometimes it just doesn’t play at all. Why it would have such difficulty playing an already downloaded file is unclear, but I suspect there is some sort of over-aggressive anti-piracy feature interfering with smooth playback. If this is not resolved and the app remains unusable I will have no reason to maintain a subscription.

Please fix audio playlist customisation.. I used to love listening to The Economist audio edition until a particular feature was removed. I used to be able to organise my audio playlist in a specific order; the world this week, then the business section, then finance, and afterwards a few select articles chosen among the remaining sections. I was able to go through the edition and organise everything once, then start and stop listening with the confidence that the playlist remained in the order I prioritised. Now whenever I add to the audio playlist it's always ordered in the way The Economist is (The World This Week, Leaders, Letters, etc) and I can arrange the playlist to my priority, which I used to do for the past few years....now I don't even want to bother with The Economist at all since I now have to either keep track of what I listened to manually and/or keep adding/removing to the playlist in order to listen while I'm doing other tasks. Very unfortunate. It would be VERY much appreciated if the feature to customise the order of the audio playlist is made available once again. Thank you.

Great Newspaper, Bad app. Like many, I was very disappointed with the Economist dropping e-ink versions of the paper. I hate having to have another reason to spend way too much time staring at a screen. And for a person that is always traveling, the paper deliveries just pile up at home, not to mention they arrive the Tuesday after the new edition is out. But, that's not the annoying part. This app will not save your location in an article you're reading if you get interrupted and leave the app, no matter what settings you chose within the app. It will also annoying start in the Home screen that attempts to feed you articles that are new. I like the layout of the paper, I want to read the sections together... so I want to have the choice to start the app right where I left off, every time. Sure, I can also sit at my desk for many more hours in a week reading the "paper", but i can't stand having a flashing add distract me while I'm reading a paragraph. It would be lovely if the Economist provided a PDF style view of the paper in their app for tablets that has the exact layout as the physical paper, this would give it a much improved aesthetic.

Won’t let me log in. I’ve been subscribed to this app through iTunes for years, now all of a sudden it won’t let me log in. Also, I get a free membership to the Economist through my school’s library, and there’s no way to log into the app using that. I’ve been paying anyway, which was frustrating, and now it won’t even let me log in at all even though I’m paying for it. I’ve tried clicking the “Restore your purchase through iTunes” button and it gives me an error. I’ve tried logging on with user name and password and it tells me to log on through the iTunes option. I tried deleting and reinstalling the app, restarting my phone, and nothing seems to work. I’ve logged on successfully via the website, but it doesn’t have all the same features as the app, such as the Morning Briefing, which is what I primarily what I read every morning. I would give this zero or negative stars if possible because I currently can’t use it at all and it therefore provides me negative utility, due to all the time I’ve wasted trying to log on. If someone can help me resolve this, I will gladly update this review to 4 or 5 stars.

Feedback on v3 update. Great app overall. Putting three stars to elevate some of the issues I encountered in the new version. I’m using the app only in dark mode, if that’s helpful context. 1. Espresso is gone. Someone else mentioned here as well. 2. App state is lost too quickly. My reading style is to jump back and forth between this app and others (e.g. switch to Wikipedia mid-article and come back afterwards to resume the same article). Currently, the app cold starts into the main menu after being the background for about a minute. This is a significant annoyance for me. 3. Read-state check marks were reset locally after the update. These were great to keep track of my backlog in recent few weekly issues. If this is a one time thing, probably I can bear the disturbance however. 4. Read-state check marks are less visible (in dark mode) on the weekly tab compared to v2. This makes it harder to find unread articles in weekly issues. 5. Articles in daily view has advertisement boxes with no advertisements in them. They show empty gray space. While I’m here, I also would like to see the read-state synced to my account server-side. Having them local only is the only reason I read the Economist on just one device, and not iPad and phone together for instance. I hope this is helpful! Thank you for the great app the dev team! i

Bring back the Legacy App. I love The Economist. It is a great newspaper and stays true to its founding mission. I loved the paper edition for all those years before we knew digital. I made the grudging transition to the digital edition. And in reality, it really was just the paper edition on a screen. It looked and navigated like the paper copy you had tucked in a pocket as you boarded your flight, only to pull it out once in your seat. And then someone in marketing, a new product manager I presume trying to make a name, decided it was time for a complete reboot of the app. “Let’s make it a contiguous stream of text”; “Let’s change the way it downloads”….so now I have an app that takes demonstrably longer to download, is unstable and inexplicably decides to remove the download you completed just yesterday. The layout resembles nothing like the newspaper, which I believe was part of the brand. To wrap this up….Bring back the legacy app. Please.

Great articles! Let’s stay positive.... The Economist is there for us to grasp the fundamentals that bring this world together and make it spin on daily basis. It is great to read and listen and trust its content. Surely, for me, its articles are like an immersion into never ending learning. Keep going! One suggestion is to try -every now and then- to show the good things about this world on macro geopolitical and societal topics. Sometimes, I feel that the tone of the conglomerate of articles tend to be too negative, although realistic. For me, often the glass if half full, and I am sure The Economist can see the world this way as well. By being positive, we can always influence our followers :)

Somehow better than doomscrolling. This is a news app, yes- and lot of the headlines are scary. But I find myself spending more time on this app than I do on other content-apps like Reddit or tiktok- bc there's just so much good hyperlinked content here. Today I started with an innocuous article about Ikea's prevalent art style, then suddenly I hyperlinked to an article about some important 60's fashion designer, which led into more articles about other fashion designers, etc. Right now, I'm scrolling through this lengthy article commentating on Julius Cesear's autobiography, it's been a whopping 5 mins, the end of the article is no where in sight, and I'm loving it. I got an Economist subscription because I initially needed a better news source. Now, between reddit and the rest of the internet being overrun by AI slop, I find myself spending more time HERE than on the actual internet?! 10/10 recommend this app and an economist subscription

Wonderful Journalism and Narration, But AI Looms. The feature that I’ve found especially useful is the narrated versions of articles. These are narrated by real humans, not AI. This sets The Economist apart from other publications such as the NYT or the Atlantic which rely on AI narration. I find AI narration unpleasant and unsettling. It is not able to convey the true emotion or flow of the writing (one has to watch, not just read, Shakespeare). The Economist’s voice actors are excellent and I appreciate that they do not simply read the article verbatim. Instead, they modify it slightly so that it flows better in a spoken format. This makes it easy and pleasant to “read” The Economist while walking or cooking. For a long time I have wanted to commend The Economist on this feature. I am spurred to now because of the recent proliferation of AI narrated articles. Several times I have tapped on an article to listen, only to be disappointed when I see that the narration is AI. Ideally, I would like all articles to be narrated by humans. I realize that this is not necessarily practical and that many other people may not feel as strongly as I do. If the choice is between AI narration and no narration, the AI option wins out. My proposed compromise would be a new icon that notes from the home page that an article has an AI narration. At present, the symbol for human or AI narration is the same, a play button. If it would be possible to create a second icon specifically for AI narration, my frustration while browsing would be reduced. Most of all though, I want to strongly recommend that The Economist broaden it’s human narration. The journalism is excellent and the app is great. I would celebrate the publication’s “humanness” both in writing and narration. May your passion and creativity continue.

Terrible app, but content is good. The app is terrible. They just didn’t take the time to think through the basics of a reading app. Every time you close your phone and reopen, you need to manually start from the beginning, navigate to the issue you are reading, navigate back to the article you were reading, and then find the place in the article you left off. It absolutely drove me nuts when on a 10 hour flight where I was constantly back and forth between reading and kids. It’s a problem the rest of the time too. Nobody would use the Kindle app if it did this. Makes me wonder how this app got high ratings. Of course, the Economist is excellent content, but since this rating is for the app, I’m focusing on the app itself.

Great content, though the app needs some love. I absolutely love the content; to the point, fact and data based journalism with a good dose of opinion from people across the political spectrum. The only reason holding me back from giving it a five star rating is the lack of features which are standard on other news apps. My top pain points: 1) not having the ability to highlight text in articles. (How many times do we highlight an interesting insight in the print magazine!) 2) the Save feature doesn’t sync across devices. It’d be great to save an article on my iPad and Web and later continue reading it on my iPhone 3) Make sharing interesting insights easier. Today I need to first copy and send the sentences I found interesting, and then share the link to the article separately. Can we please combine these two steps together, so that I can share a particular sentence and have the app-auto attach the link to the article as well? Not only will it be a better user experience, but it’ll accelerate the growth of the app. Great work to the team and thanks for considering the feedback!

A lifetime source of information and thought…. I initiated my love affair with The Economist at age 26, receiving the flimsy-paper airmail edition weekly when the definite article was the capitalized and part of its calling. It followed me in working stints in Chile, Brazil, and El Salvador. For me, the inventor of the “Big Mac Index of Currency Exchange Rates” represented the greatest English language news journal and the best source for world news(given McDonald’s closing its 850 stores in Russia, it leaves the Index in a bit of a bind, or does it switch to the cost of a liter of bottled water with the standard quart augmented by a 1.06 factor?), which kept me well rounded and which I relished. And now, some sixty years later, I feel the same way. Bravo Economist!

World Class Journalism!. As an Economist reader, either Print or Digital, for a decade or so, more or less; I have come to appreciate the in depth analytical manner in which important topics of broad interest are presented and articulated with a wealth of experience and knowledge. Other long standing readers of The Economist can certainly add their own verbal applause based on their own unique reading interests and experiences. For those considering a subscription, I suggest trying out the free one month trial subscription, to observe for themselves the Economist’s exceptional journalistic analysis first hand, and if it suits their news reading needs, continue with a monthly subscription, in order to double check your intuition’s approval that you have discovered reliable trustworthy journalism, then after a month or two of reassurance, you may be surprised to find yourself cancelling your auto-renew monthly digital subscription, and opting for the annual digital subscription, which offers a better annual price than 12 months of the monthly auto-renewal option. But whichever subscription strategy you eventually sign on to long term, I would like to suggest and even predict, that as the years pass, you will find yourself to be better experienced and knowledgeable in a wide range of important worldwide issues, expertly articulated with thoughtful analysis and valuable expertise. In my final analysis and limited opinion; and within the decade or so of my Economist reading experience; The Economist has consistently set the standard of worldwide journalistic excellence for others to follow; well done; Economist; Well Done!

Version 3.36.0 is not quite there yet. It’s nice that you can one again select a word and look it up. Unfortunately you cannot expand the selection to more than one word. Also, with the smallest text size the last couple of words in a paragraph are sometimes missing. My wish list includes syncing saved articles and the check mark for articles you have read between devices. And some actions, like saving an article, are strangely sluggish. I often think I failed to tap the bookmark icon, only to discover that I have now tapped it twice and it is turned off again, A display of the most recent articles would also be nice. I sometimes use Apple News to get that. I don’t want to miss articles that were online but never made it into the print edition. I’d like a Daily Charts section in the digital weekly edition like the Economist Explains section, and extra articles in other areas, like we get for the Britain section in the U.S. The content remains great and I appreciate the addition of photo captions. Thanks.

Good magazine, mediocre app. I love The Economist, but their app suffers from a number of issues: 1. Even after logging in with a paid subscription, the app demands that you subscribe via a pop-up at the bottom and a permanent link at the top. 2. It logs you out frequently and doesn’t readily accept your information when you log back in. 3. There are minor glitches. 4. There is no search function for articles and so it is an ordeal to go back beyond the current issue to find things of interest, which is extremely annoying and contrary to other media app common practices. 5. When clicking on The Economist articles in social media, it has to jump through Safari and then the app, which takes a few seconds, and sometimes you get stuck in Safari where it pretends you are not a subscriber and... demands that you subscribe before showing you the article that you have paid good money for. 6. The overall layout of the app is not extremely well designed, which requires a lot of clicking to get around and allows one to easily miss even current articles (much less historical articles, which are extremely difficult to find). Too much graphics and repetitive links and links that aren’t relevant and not enough smooth/ seamless connections to other current or historical articles.

Needs lots of improvements. Even if I’ve downloaded an issue, the app still needs Internet access. If I download issues and then go on an airplane and reopen the app, it still needs Internet access to show any articles or play any audio — defeating the entire purpose of downloading the issue for offline access. The reason appears to be a combination of bad requirements, coding, and testing. It is a bad requirement to require network connectivity to view an issue or play its audio while offline. Poor coding leads to a terrible outcome since the already downloaded data should be presented to the user even when offline. Lastly, it seems that the testers never tested such use cases while offline (airplanes or elevators/lifts or garages/carparks or anywhere else where network access is not available). I love The Economist’s content. I have also been a user of The Economist app for as long as it has been out, and I continue to be disappointed in its performance.

Worse and worse. The news on The Economist is fantastic, as always. However, the app seems to be getting worse and worse. As near as I can tell, it is non-functional if you do not have an active Internet connection, despite the option of downloading entire issues. On top of that, even with an active connection, when it changes story an error often comes up saying “something went wrong”, and requiring action on the listener’s part before the next story plays. This is so bad that that I often just switch to a recorded book in frustration. The latest update seems to have made things even worse. Not only does the applications still run poorly when there is not an active Internet connection, but it has also gotten very slow to respond, and often starts playing all by itself minutes after I have stopped it. So I could be in the middle of a meeting, and suddenly everyone is surprised to hear my phone loudly reading a news story over the speaker. It is amazingly bad considering how good the rest of The Economist’s operations seem to be.

Good with 2 big flaws. This app overall is quite well done but there are two big flaws I wish they would fix. Both are a form of bloatware I believe: 1. There is an ad loaded/displayed between EVERY story. Come on! Plus the ads take a second or two to load, so that’s happening every time you flip between stories. 2. It almost never remembers my place: i.e. whenever I flip back to the app it almost always reloads to the Home Screen instead of the last article I was reading. I’m no developer but I assume this is because the app itself must be some kind of resource hog and so it’s getting killed in the background whenever I switch to something else. Please fix! It’s tedious to have to always bookmark my current story and then navigate back to it every time I switch to the app.

Fix the bugs. Screen sizing not correct. The main reading pane has to be resized when the carousel indicators are on the bottom or the audio status. These are covering the reading pane or part of a bottom ad. After you build an audio queue and close and reopen the app, the audio loading indicator spins and no way to play audio. This makes audio queueing unusable The audio queueing ux needs some thought. If you close the audio controls there is no way to get into edit mode without either going to the edition edit queue button under editions or restarting the app. If you use build queue under editions, you should be given option of adding to the start or end of an existing queue. Now it always puts selected articles at the end.

The only news magazine worth taking!. I have taken the Economist for 30+ years. Nowhere else will I get news from around the world that has both economic considerations and political in depth but accessible. Once while coming back from the Middle East, there was a small article entitled, The moonshine capital of America, Franklin, County, Virginia. It was an accurate portrayal of the culture of SW Virginia. Add this to what is happening economically in equatorial Africa or Southeast Asia and you have quite a comprehensive mix of news and analysis. I’ve accepted the fact that I cannot read everything each week in the Economist so I never run out of articles of interest! My son reads the Economist on line and dedicates Thursday evening to the latest news. We both find the editorial commentary to be balanced and any biases transparent! This magazine is a refreshing breath of air in a world with so much unhelpful spin and fabrication!

Balanced Journalism and a Great App. I started reading The Economist at around 16 (yes, really). It was recommended reading for passing my British army entrance tests and I’ve been a fan ever since. The idea of truly unbiased journalism is a myth - as soon as one picks up a pen or a camera, they are biased. What is included or omitted is as much a part of bias as what opinion is deliberately conveyed. That said, I think The Economist does an excellent job of being balanced; and when it is taking a side, it says so - elections, wars, major debates. I particularly like the lack of affiliation of each piece and the ‘voice’ of the paper, I find it reduces grandstanding and personal politics (anyone willing to write for a paper that deliberately doesn’t give the author credit is alright by me). Then there’s the app. It can be read daily as a source of news or you can read the weekly edition ‘cover-to-cover’ as I do. If you’re looking for a great one-stop-shop for informed news, The Economist app is it.

Audio playback has been fixed, but additional features would be appreciated. I’ve been subscribed to The Economist for several years and the audio edition has become my primary method of consumption. It’s very convenient to listen to the articles during my commute or while working around the house. The latest update seems to have fixed the audio playback issues where article audio would take forever to load and then crash somewhere in the middle, losing your progress. I haven’t had any of these issues since updating to the latest app version. I would give the app 5 stars but have taken off a star due to the lack of AirPlay support for the audio edition. I can play all my music and podcasts through my AirPlay speakers, but not The Economist - please add this.

Needs a stability patch NOW! (Iphone 6+). I find ridiculous that the Economist is allowing this app to deteriorate as I’ve witnessed. I used to use the old app which just downloaded a digital copy of the magazine until I transitioned to the new app. Now the old app was very clunky and did not provide the most current news daily, but at least it was a functioning piece of software. I’ve had the app crash so many times today that I began to wonder if it was an issue with my phone (an Iphone 6 Plus). However, after several restarts and ensuring that every other app was closed the app STILL crashed every. Single. Time. When I first downloaded the app it would crash from time to time-probably once a day- but this has gotten out of hand. I can’t even read the short morning briefs because the app isn’t reliable enough to not crash within 15 seconds loading; which in itself took over 15 seconds. I don’t want to be that guy but the apps almost unusable for me now and I LOVE your content. At this rate I find myself reading less and less of this brilliant magazine due to this issue. I don’t use a paper subscription anymore because it quickly became clutter; the old app doesn’t have the daily curated articles nor the morning briefs; and now that the state of the app is this subpar I almost feel to shift to another source as primary news app such Reuters. PLEASE give this app some care, because in all honesty, when this app is functioning as intended it THE BEST “news” app in my humble opinion.

Bad App Experience. Update April 26: Please bring back the legacy app. The newest versions are still unstable and offer an inferior user experience. Updated March 27: This app continues to be absolutely awful and distracts from the content. Hard to know if it’s spinning for an ad or content. Legacy app was perfect, not sure why we had to move. Consider a new pricing tier that includes access to the legacy app please. Older review: Seeing the continued pleas to stop using the legacy iOS app, it is disingenuous to claim that the new version is better. If you’re going to force us to transition to the inferior app, please include settings that allow us to mimic the legacy app (i.e., one download of the weekly edition, no streaming, no links, no updates - just a digital replication of the weekly print edition). Will seriously consider whether to keep my subscription if forced off the legacy app without a workable solution in place.

Consistently buggy. I’ve been using the economist app for a little bit over 5 years now and have yet to have a consistent, bug free experience over a month long period. One of the following will generally stop working until the developers patch the app which can take 1-2 weeks: the audio will simply not play (even if downloaded), the app will crash (even if it is the only app open), the editions will not download or downloaded editions will not open, or some combination of all the above. This is not a review for the Economist as a publication, I’ve been an avid reader of the print edition since uni and I will continue to do so. However the lack of consistency with the app is disappointing. All the more troubling is the economist’s decision to move some of their podcasts onto the app for subscribers only which would be sound business decision if the infrastructure (the app they are migrating to) consistently worked.

Brilliant Topics Keep Me Thinking Well Afterwards. I may be disabled from health issues. In the past couple years, I may have had to walk away from my CPA Firm I worked so hard to build, but my brain still wants to learn... just on its own timeline. The Economist App provides that for me... and how ever my body needs to take it in!! Days when my eyes struggle or concentration is tough due to pain, I can put in my AirPods and immerse into learning about the economic world via listening! If I can’t take in full articles, the morning briefings are perfect. Best if all, it gives me things to think about. And the ones that are still lingering around at dinner time, provide my husband and I something intelligent to discuss and mull over. Feels as if I may still “have it” ... Thank You.

App has issues. Love the economist, hate the app. The content and setup is good, but it is incredibly slow and laggy. I download issues to work offline or when I have bad service, but then the app takes 3 minutes to load in bad service areas while it tries to connect. Then there is a huge delay in opening articles and difficulty in getting to downloaded issues unless I open them up ahead of time before or lose service or get on a plane. If you minimize the app for two minutes to answer a text or read an email, there’s a high chance the app will reload from scratch - you’ll have to wait at the red screen of death for a while, then find your article and your place in it all over. Why not remember where we were reading? So slow. So laggy. On every device. Also, I downloaded the whole newspaper for offline - it’s taking enough space on my device that the graphics should load offline.

Amazing content, terrible app. I love the content - best news source out there. But the app is a nightmare. The audio playback doesn't function at a basic level. There is no ability to skip back or forwards 15 seconds outside of the app (eg, by tapping the skip command on my Airpods or car). Anytime other audio plays, the app fails to start the audio again afterward. When this happens, the whole audio playback on the notification screen often crashes and the app has to be manually reopened. Even when the audio playback is nominally active, it often doesn't respond to commands to play through headphones, etc. All of these features are standard in every audio app I've used on iOS. Given how expensive the subscription is, it's very disappointing that it can't handle basic audio functionality. Yes, I've un-installed and renstalled, my software version of ios and the app is up to date, restarted.

A great legacy app, but this new one garbage. I put off downloading the “improved” app as long as I could. This week’s issue, however, no longer has an audio option in the legacy app. The new app is unfortunately an absolutely horrendous mess. Much more like a typical website than a magazine or newspaper, every article is cluttered with superfluous links and with suggestions for “related” articles or sites. Worst of all, to swipe from one article to the next, one needs to swipe twice because every article—EVERY SINGLE ONE—is followed by an ad. HALF the issue is ads. Unbelievable! So I have deleted the “improved” app and will continue with the legacy app (sadly with no audio option) until The Economist no longer supports it, then I will unsubscribe. After having subscribed in print or digitally for four decades, I believe. I can’t justify over two hundred dollars a year to read the magazine on such a supremely annoying, ad-stuffed app.

🐜-ridden. Obviously this review is for the application performance and not for the content - which is excellent, otherwise I would not pay for a subscription. I have many issues with this app. A tech support representative even admitted to me were legitimate flaws with the iOS version (I finally called Tech Support when I just couldn’t take it anymore) and that they had no timeline of when they would address these bugs. I use the app predominantly for the audio version of the articles because I listen on my commute. Here is a summation of my issues: -Navigation is still terrible (though they did finally add a table of contents menu and a check mark symbol next to articles indicating you’ve finished-I wish this would transfer to the table of contents so I can see at a glance what I’ve read and what I still need to). -Audio download constantly interrupts or just completely fails over WiFi and data. -The Play button is wonky. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Tech support literally told me I would have to start from the beginning of each section every time this happens and then advance through using the fast-forward button. What? -Sometimes the audio playback repeats a sentence or skips a word/paragraph. -I can’t stand some of the voices of the narrators (this is obviously more preference than a flaw) and some of the volumes in which they speak are way too low so I have to turn up my speakers so loud and then be blasted by their jingles when the next article starts. Please fix!

Didn’t do their planning with transition to upgrades version. As a long-time fan and loyal reader of The Economist, I find myself appalled at the disastrous execution of its latest app update. This once-great product has been stripped of essential features from the previous version, leaving users to contend with a frustratingly subpar experience. While the playlist feature was eventually reinstated after backlash, the inability to clear the playlist is an unforgivable oversight. This glaring flaw has resulted in an unwieldy 10+ hours of audio tracks that cannot be removed, forcing users to manually stop playback—an especially maddening ordeal if you happen to fall asleep mid-session. The carelessness of this rollout is both disappointing and infuriating, leaving me questioning how such a trusted publication could deliver an app so riddled with avoidable issues. Fix this mess, and fast.

Stick with the legacy app -- 2024 update. If you want to read the weekly magazine on your phone, this app is terrible. Weird jumps between and within articles—you’ll be reading and suddenly it jumps to a different part of the article or a different article entirely. It also doesn’t keep your place when you leave the app, which the old app did. And it has about 5 times as many ads. The new app also bombards you with notifications you can’t control. The same quality of journalism is there but the Economist should be embarrassed—the content is undermined by a broken experience. Stick with the legacy app. Update Aug 2024: the app is even slower, almost unusably. You open it, you wait, you click an article, you wait, you try to flip to another article, it hangs while it loads an ad, and frequently bumps to the top of an article so it can load an ad. I really want to like this app buts it's so awful vs. the old app. I'm on an iphone 13 pro. This is the slowest app I own.

News, but better.. I never personally thought I’d be writing a review for a news app. I’m a 21 year old college student and generally skeptical of news organizations. After taking a class with a heavy usage of Economist articles, I see why my professor uses them in his lesson plans: they’re factual. After multiple months of contemplating whether or not to get a subscription, I finally pulled the trigger. The app is almost seamless, minus a few features I wish I could have in the app like a search option and a viewing history for easier access to show my friends the articles (I wish I could give you all a half star less for this, but I’ll go with 5 stars because I enjoy the content so much). I feel as though I can put my trust in The Economist because they deliver the news in a digestible and palatable way. I enjoy being able to audibly listen to articles and understanding what’s going on in the world. If you’re tired of traditional American news companies like NBC, Fox, CBS, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others, then try out The Economist. The Economist offers a new level of detail, honesty, factuality, and trust that I appreciate when it comes to news reporting. I intend to resubscribe for more after my introductory subscription. The Economist (as far as I understand) does not do editorials or opinion pieces. They offer well thought out news reporting and a deeper understanding of current events.

Excellent. The Economist is my favorite news magazine and the app is easy to use and well designed. it is certainly one of the most reliable sources of analysis and information for me. However there are two areas which I find which the Economist fails to take its usual broad-minded approach of treating both sides of the issue., the first is the debate around climate change. The Economist has decided to editorially to accept the often one-sided claims of so-called climate alarmists. Although this is obviously an area where there is robust debate, tht Economist usually fails to provide the other side of the debate, which does not see the world was facing an imminent catastrophe due to climate change. There is simply too much evidence against the alarmist view to justify it being ignored. The other area has to do with race relations in the United States, in which parallel to the climate debate that usually takes a one-sided view, and fails to consider seriously the vast amounts of evidence rejecting the thesis of widespread racism in the United States. Nonetheless, it is brilliantly, written, engaging, and in most cases, except for those, I’ve indicated a real education which I learned from every week.

Content is outstanding, delivery just meh.. Firstly, I’m an iOS user and get my content from the Economist primarily via audio. This content is fantastic - no complaints and gets five stars. But this is an app review and the app is frustrating for several reasons but primarily because I have no idea how to manage and use the audio “queue”. There is no obvious way to initiate the audio play feature except if you only care to play the audio from an article that is showing in the weekly section. In the Home Screen I want a nice big button that says “Audio Queue” it something like that and in which a means of adding you and deleting from the queue is possible. I have been using this app for over 5 yrs and this morning as I write this review, I have no idea how to start playing the selection of articles I was listening to yesterday!! This is awful! Economist, please fire your app developer and hire someone.. anyone else.

First rate journalism, visual disaster. The economist remains one of the best sources of news anywhere, so it’s a real shame just how much they’ve lost their way from a design perspective. This has to be one of the least attractive news apps I’ve ever seen. I’m sure a lot of time and money went into developing the new app/website, but it just looks awful. Backgrounds are different shades of gray and white (and dark mode is even worse), weekly stories are presented as just one long list with no attempt at design or layout, and no thought seems to have gone into the use of blank space/ margins or the visual coherence of the app. What’s worse, the old version of the app—and the website for that matter—were a model of clean, uncluttered design.

Bugs in latest release. I have loved this app and made it my primary means of accessing the content for more than one year now. With the latest update the audio playback seems ruined. Though the audio opens with each new issue and appears to automatically download, the playback takes several seconds, almost a minute in most cases to begin. It is almost as if the download restarts each time I open the app, and the audio files are not actually saved. Moreover the playback lasts for about half of an article, and if my screen turns off or I lock the phone, the playback and the app seem to crash. I am not sure what changed, but the stability of the app is terrible all of a sudden. Particularly with regard to the audio playback. I do like the new arrangement and layout of the ability to access the different audio articles, but there is no point if the articles won’t play.

Weekly edition has been broken for months. I challenge anyone on the dev team for this app to try reading the weekly edition. Start at the beginning and reas a few articles. Put it away. Come back in a few hours and pick up in the same place. Wait two days, find your place again, and read some more articles. If they were to do this, they would uncover multiple crippling, infuriating bugs that have gone unfixed for months. Articles will switch while you’re in the middle of reading them, all of a sudden you will go backwards by several articles. The app frequently doesn’t save your place, so every time you open it you need to go back through the table of contents to figure out where you were. This is a significant regression in functionality from how the app used to work, and it’s honestly embarrassing for a professionally produced app to have this many bugs of this severity sitting unfixed for this long. Stop building new features and fix your bugs!

Cancellation process is horrendous. This a good news source. It’s very well done hence the two stars, however 1. It’s really expensive ($220 a year unless you complain and threaten to cancel) 2. I’m not sure what’s harder, a divorce or cancelling this news subscription. First you can’t do this easily on the app you have to go to, “contact us” on the app, look in the FAQ’s where you can then log in. At that point you find, “change my subscription”. There’s a button that says, “cancel my subscription”, you’re asked why, then you’re given a sales pitch in writing based on your reason. In order to move forward with the cancellation you’re required to chat with them! A sales representative joins the chat, then I was asked AGAIN to provide my name and address and why I wanted to cancel, they tried to keep me again by offering a discount. Finally the rep cancelled my subscription. This entire process took me over 20 minutes. Making it that hard to cancel on purpose so people give up and keep giving money is bad business.

Feedback. The Economist article on Economics topics are generally of high quality and well documented and researched BUT those on the middle conflict and in particular those presenting facts about the actual events are biased and distorted. They cover up Israel crimes. Fir example when reporting about Gaza, the article don't miss to mention that Gaza is ruled by Hamas. Israel is also ruled by criminals. The article miss to mention that the people in Gaza are under siege and are in an open prison imposed by the racist and criminals ruling Israel. There is no human face of the Economist when reporting about Israel crimes. How do the Economist consider the Oppressed and the eco pied at the same footing as the oppressor and the occupier. "Conflict" is a dishonest way to report in an occupation where a whole generation of a whole nation was destroyed, killed, put in prison, dépréciés of basic human needs and even water just to be racially eliminated and deported from own home to live, if managed to survive, as refugees in foreign lands.

Love the economist, but the app is janky. Strictly speaking on the quality of the app, it’s not good. Poor UI decisions are further hampered by a sluggish and glitchy app which I regularly need to force close, despite being on a 2021 iPad with fully updated OS and app version. For instance; the pages will freeze halfway through a swipe showing just 1/3rd of the article, clicking images/charts will freeze the app, the sizing regularly chooses to go it’s own way, migrating across the weekly edition isn’t user friendly or intuitive. Additionally, I’m on a iPhone 13 with full updated OS and this app literally CRASHES MY PHONE. I’m an app developer and I know what in talking about when I say It’s just this app where it happens and is complete trash.

Latest app broke audio playback across articles. Update: The developer responded and said this issue will be fixed in the next release. Bumping from 2->4 stars, and will go to 5 once fixed! The 3.0 version of the app broke the ability to listen to multiple audio articles with the phone in your pocket. I used to be able to pick the first article in a section and then they would all auto play. Now when on cellular data, if the phone screen is locked, it isn’t able to load the audio for the next article; it shows a “Something went Wrong” error. This means at the end of every track I have to unlock the phone and click the retry button for it to work.

An American Conservative Review of the Economist. I have only recently subscribed to the Economist and my initial impression is favorable. Your reporting is more balanced than what I am accustomed to from the Financial Times, the other European publication I read on a daily basis. I value the European perspective on "the American Experiment," still evolving after 243 years! There is a sense of desperation on the political Left in America. They want to be well received at Davos and will do and say anything to try to convince the world that we have abandoned the principles of our Revolution in favor of woke globalism. Nothing could further from the truth, most Americans have never heard of Davos and are not interested in the globalist ideas of President Obama, but you won't hear that from American media.

Very unbiased, Economics is the perspective. I love this mag. I mean I really do (Econ Major at UCO btw). The only complaint I have is the excess of ads despite me paying the full price. Otherwise I think that this is the most worthwhile news source to date. A lot of people used to consider The Economist to be a conservative newspaper, but truly I tell you that it has done a 180 in 2020, they really just use economics alone as their guiding subject. They were supporting the vaccine when it was first out and mostly a political issue. They don’t pander to leftists or conservatives very often or really at all. Also they take good critical letters from respected individuals in their letters section. I truly enjoy disagreeing with an article and then finding someone smarter than me who wrote exactly why it is wrong, I could go on and on about this magazine. I love the formatting (shorter less fiddly articles, with all of the facts and as little opinion as possible) and I’m definitely a lifelong customer as long as that Economist quality is retained. I also really enjoy how the economist never says we think that (…) they always say this is the way to fix it or just state things how they are based on economic indications. There is actual evidence to back up economics, rather than some crazy conservative conspiracy theory, or a radical leftist rant. I don’t think they’re always right but this leads to a level of honesty. Excellent customer service also.

The Economist Knows Digital. The Economist app for iPad is excellent. If you’re accustomed to reading the magazine in print, the transition to digital is seamless. The layout is straight forward with each section of the “newspaper” at the top of the screen. You can quickly and easily “jump” to the section you want to read. The photos and graphics are crystal clear. You can easily save stories to read later. You can “gift” articles to share an article with a friend or colleague. You can download an entire issue to read at your leisure. Finally, and perhaps best of all, you can access back issues from an archive. That’s truly a luxury you can hold in your hands. 5 Stars

These people are excellent at their jobs. I was compelled by a recent piece on the history of Russia’s attitudes towards Ukraine to post an enthusiastic, if disappointingly thinly answered, paean to the journalists of the Economist on my Facebook page. To be able to combine history, journalism and a spot of political philosophy in such a piece, in readable and lucid format, without dumbing down or preaching, and to do this sort of thing in five or six pieces week in, week out, takes more than impressive talent. It must demand application, which is belied by the impression of effortlessness it conveys. This, my friends, is real journalism. And I don’t always agree with what it is saying (although I must confess disproportionate alignment with content on an ongoing basis). Subscribing digitally, after years of enjoying the paper version and then enduring a long absence, was a very, very good idea. I flagellate myself for not reading more. The Economist deftly assuages some of these feelings.

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I love The Economist. I have always read The Economist since the early 90’s. Now retired ( I am only 60) but worked in finance for 25 years so it’s one of the very few publications I continue to subscribe because of the quality, depth and range of the articles. I have recently renewed my subscription as digital only (previously in Australia you still got the print edition with the online) and my main feedback is that it feels to me (in week 1) that there are too many App options - possibly due to the different package deals - so I am finding it little messy and I seem to have to continually log back in. I am sure these are just me getting used to the Apps now I don’t have the hard copy print edition. Please don’t think because of my age I am not tech savvy as I am. A bit impatient maybe 😇. Just feedback on the mechanics not on the content which I doubt I could not live without!

Intelligent trusted analysis and news. I have enjoyed the benefits of the Economist throughout my professional life and in retirement e where I continue to work in a nfp way. Easy to read , accessible on my phone plus the Espresso keeps me informed and engaged . Thank you for a bit of sanity in this mad world of online rubbish conspiracy theories and tabloid rubbish ( I live in Australia …look forward to seeing a bit more about us )

Exceptional, but please maintain the quality. The Economist is exceptional. The journalism is unparalleled. The app is a great way to access the journalism. I have two minor criticisms though, that I only air here in the hope of future iteration and improvement: 1. The audio queue often replays old articles, over and over, until it is cleared. The UI isn’t as intuitive here as it could be. It feels half baked and could do with some attention. 2. The new World In Brief audio recording appears to be AI generated, instead of recorded by a real person like other articles. This detracts from the quality of the journalism and is distracting. It would be preferable to have a poorly produced and mastered recording of a real person. Please reconsider. Don’t hesitate though. The Economist really is the bee’s well-informed knees.

Quality but here is why I am leaving you. I have enjoyed the Economist for decades but I have two concerns... 1. Your high standards seem to be declining on factual reporting. I have too many examples of your fact selection being biased on the narrative you want and not representative. This has reduced my trust in how you report on areas where I have less direct access to the facts separately. 2. You are losing the nuance re for example the limitations of liberalism and globalisation and you predictably come down on the side of your ideology regardless. This is by the way largely my thinking - but I do not want confirmation bias I want objective thinking. Of course your predictable caveat at the end of the article seeks to cover the alternative but that is no substitute for more rigorous journalism. So I have cancelled my subscription. What I so valued for years seems captured like so much media by a dominate ideology rather than what I seek which is unbiased enlightenment. I wonder how homogeneous the thinking now is at the Economist? Thanks for many good reads - you are still better than most of the rest.

After update restore subscription doesn’t work. After updating, the app requested to restore subscription via iTunes and it gives an error message “something has gone wrong, try again later”. 6 hours later it still says the same thing. As I am about to get on a flight it is very disappointing.

Content great however new app poor. The new Economist app is only a patch on the previous version. Slowish downloads I can forgive. However it doesn’t play/pause on my ‘household name’ brand Bluetooth headset. In 2022 that is a non-negotiable! Please fix it so I can enjoy the audio version of the magazine again.

Works well but subscription overpriced in some countries. The app is pretty good but the pricing is annoying when customers are charged more in Australia than other countries. It’s just a bunch of electrons available on the net and should be the same price internationally.

Connected and updated. I always thought my dad was the wisest and most knowledgeable person in the world. He read The Economist cover to cover every week and it was by his bedside in hospital the day he died. This app takes the Economist to the next level. Same excellent journalism but easy to navigate, in-app podcasts, the ability to bookmark and share articles. And I feel like dad is still with me each day when I open it.

A robust read. The Economist has become my go-to source for news and current affairs. Its articles are well written with intelligent arguments and robust facts to back it up. I read Espresso every morning and revisit the app during the day to read the main articles and stay informed.

Great Magazine, beware of a nasty surprise when ending your subscription service. Love my digital subscription service. Due to the higher subscription fees I sadly had to terminate my annual subscription. Despite cancelling my account online before the renewal date I was charged the annual fee and am forced to chase after customer service who claim they are unable to help and need to escalate the inquiry. Very dissappointed with the unprofessional customer service experience.

Personal opinion of journalists infiltrating the meant to be fact based reports. I’ve enjoyed many of the articles inside the economist, mainly to do with stock prices, large corporations and various country relations reports. But apart from that many of the articles are a opinion piece and try to drive a certain narrative, rather then the actual story. I guess this is hard to do nowadays, but whenever an article tries to summarise or villainise a clearly complex piece ( as the world is- many shades of grey and not black and white) then clearly information is missing. Unfortunately there are very little pieces of news or journalism that will tell you the truth nowadays.

Good newspaper, terrible app. The Economist is one of the best newspapers in the world. It’s app is one of the worst. Slow to load, clunky and crashes frequently if you try to read the weekly paper, rather than the selection of stories served up each day. And it has been like this for years. Given its readership, I would have thought an efficient app, which most high schoolers can now manage, would have been a priority, but obviously not.

Informative and well written journalism. Pity about the app. Excellent journalism, well written , impartial and informative. The Economist provides me with a view of issues and developments across the globe. I am not aware of another publication with the breadth and depth of coverage. Each week I read the Economist before any other periodical. The only issue I have is the stability of the app. I listen to the Economist via the app rather than read it. Unfortunately the app is the least stable of all apps I access. This week for example if could download the week’s edition but it came without audio. I have done all the usual things but to no avail and have not received a reply to my email of two days ago. Issues like this occur regularly. Surely an organisation of the quality of the Economist could engage someone to manage the app effectively

Apple Car play app. This feedback relates to the Apple Car Play screen for the Economist app: A recent update replaced the forward one article/back one article buttons with forward/back 10 seconds. I find the new setup frustrating because there are some articles I’d like to skip and would appreciate you changing it back to the way it was.

Excellent journalism with a decent app. The Economist has excellent journalism covering a remarkably wide range of topics across the world. The app itself is decent but not perfect; I like that weekly editions are downloadable for offline reading, a feature I rely on, and that it does a decent job of remembering your place and what you have read. I don’t like the lack of a slideover or split-screen mode on the iPad. I often like to read while I’m waiting for something — say a meeting about to start, or an opponent to play their move in a game. The Economist iPad app insists on being full-screen which means I inevitably read something else because I can’t share the screen with the iPad app.

How can’t you want to know (or how I learned to live with not knowing everything). The Economist’s Christmas edition’s prompt to search on maps Singapore’s last urban village, its digital end of year summary now throwing out insights into the economics of food delivery - how can’t you want to know about either, or indeed much more of what’s happening around us. The intersection of PPE, the closing obituary, a site that’s just as useful as a paper copy that’s critical to have tucked into your work bag …

Podcasts aren’t downloadable for offline listening.. Unlike other podcast apps, the podcast function that I keep being directed to while listening to The Intelligence, does not allow for offline listening. As a subscriber I have been looking forward to the new podcast content being touted. But as I live in a rural area with poor cellular access, this is a dealbreaker for me.

Fantastic. I've now become a fan of the new app and really like the daily pics and morning briefing. Of course, the 'This Week' section is the heart and what drives me to pay the quite hefty subscription fee. I would however, like to make one suggestion. With so much great content coming out over time the glaring short fall to me is the 'bookmarks' section. This really needs an upgrade with some very basic features like sorting the bookmarks by the date & time when they were first created or by the newspaper issue they come from. It would seriously enhance the ability to recall and reference articles that I often find myself describing to people and struggling to then find in the app (of course to ensure I'm quoting the facts correctly!). Thanks for your time to consider this enhancement.

Great content but app fails to remember position. Every time I go back to the app (on iPad), either from Lock Screen or another app, it initially starts on the page I was last on, but then a few seconds later jumps to a different article at some random position in the weekly order. This is very annoying and requires me to go back to the index to find where I was. It would also be good if it syncronised marked articles across devices as I sometimes also read on my iPhone.

Real news, truthful and reliable. What a treat to read well organised relevant news that satisfies my need to know what is going on in the world and what is likely coming next. No self important declamations to dishearten, but a range of views for people who are still able change their mind.

An eternal source of reality. I have read the economist now for 40 years. Paying for a subscription for the last 25. It’s news and analysis for those of us who know how complex the world can be. The economist continues to be a wonderful source of real information in an unreal world.

Needs “Find on page” function and usability fixes. I would love to wordsearch within an article when I need to quickly skim an article or find a specific detail. Without this function I must rely on the website; this makes the app redundant for me. Also, when i try and select text to copy, lookup etc. it never highlights the end of the last word. It often ends up highlighting to the middle of the last word, so i have to inefficiently extend the highlighter rightwards. Plus, I can’t understand why the app doesn’t have an article categories section eg. ‘Finance and economics’, ‘Asia’, ‘Graphic detail’ etc., as is provided on the website. Some articles, especially graphic details and daily charts, only appear to be discoverable and readable on the website. This lack of interoperability makes very little sense. I love TE, but the app requires much improvement - which, unfortunately in my experience, has not been forthcoming.

Factual news and content. The economist app with subscription comes with narrated articles of their weekly edition, just great to hear narrated pieces while driving etc. I especially love the Morning espresso every morning. Great way to catch up to the world.

Battery draining info theft. Time to remove. Sick of this app’s battery drain. How much information is it taking from my device to drain the battery so much? And if you bother to limit what it can take, it asks you to set those flags every time you open it up. Only “allowing all” frees you from having to reapply your settings each usage. And much of the reporting is becoming editorial without those stories being flagged as editorials.

Best news and information service. Functionality keeps getting better and better. But, the main reason I use the app is the content. Best value subscription that gives you global coverage across so many dimensions - politics, security, technology, finance etc.

Great new audio version. The lasted version significantly enhanced the integration of the audio features with iPhone and provides a great audio interface. Much improved and highly recommended for those listening to the weekly Economist.

The Economist app. In world where there is so little good journalism, it is terrific to have place that will inform you! Even articles that are old I still find informative, it helps explain why. Not just opinion, lots of information and data. With all the podcasts there is simply so many ways to inform yourself! Truly great value. Being informed, NOT entertained, is what I am after. Well informed journalism, with supporting information really works.

Subscription failure. Do not buy - mine worked for 3 weeks then randomly said I don’t have a subscription. Spent hours on the phone to the economist who blamed iTunes and then called Apple who blamed the economist. My subscription was clear in my iTunes account and payment had gone out, but the app clearly has a glitch. iTunes ended up refunding it as they couldn’t fix. After all it worked to begin with so no idea why the economist said it was iTunes’ fault... Real shame and very disappointed - would also add customer services terrible at economist but excellent at apple...

Podcast Subscription Disappointing. I was disappointed with The Economist’s podcast subscription. The service only provides access to a limited selection of their catalogue, which was not made clear during the signup process. Many of the podcasts are years old, and the content offered is no better than what can be found online for free. Given the cost, I expected a more comprehensive archive and exclusive content, but it falls short. Not worth the subscription.

A buggy mess once again.. Still baffles me how people treat this as a review of the magazine content and not the app but so be it. Playlists can only be navigated in one direction - the back button is inoperable once a track has passed. The audio will continue to play as soon as headphones are put away even if you have paused it prior to taking them off. It feels bloated and adrift from its core mission of delivering the magazine digitally. Why on earth it has the capacity to play podcasts despite the Apple podcast app being a far more polished experience seems nonsensical.

Poor Australian coverage. I read your paper to get a general idea of what’s going on in the world, including in obscure parts I would normally not know about. It is a little disconcerting that folks with little understanding of Australian politics might take as informed and impartial your recent coverage of Australia’s decision to build and operate nuclear submarines, which was almost entirely informed by a couple of commentators opposed to the decision (and the broader direction of national security policy). A more serious and diligent attempt to reflect the alternative and broadly accepted view of the decision would have given me more confidence that your coverage of other out of the way countries reflects reality.

App finally fixed and working well 👍👍👍👍👍. It’s now been a few months since the update finally came to the app. For the last couple of years the digital and audio experience has been at odds with the Economist high quality journalism and content. Very happy customer again

Consider adding transcribe feature like Apple Podcasts have done recently. Economist App is good But for hearing impaired it would be great to have the para and sentences being read out highlighted like Apple Podcasts now do. Apple Podcasts added this feature in the last month or so. It also auto scrolls the webpage so we dont have to.

New app is great but. Love the new rendering features to show more interactive article presentation by seeming current and relevant history. BUT since i can NEVER get the audio to download for this app, i keep the old app where it works. So every week i download my issue, usually via wifi. The download circle goes for hours and hours, but never finishes a download. Yes every week i cancel last week’s download (still going after a week). Yes i my app is up to date, and yes my os is up to date. Still not working.

Brilliant. The Economist Espresso app is my all-time favourite, though the regular Economist app has easy format reading for full articles with great personalisation features. I prefer it to the hardcopy magazine, personally. Content-wise, Economist’s journalism is virtually second-to-none; it’s hard to imagine my morning routine without a dose of Economist in it.

Slow on some devices. Given the price of subscription it’s such a shame the legacy app is being discontinued as this app is slow and buggy on my iPad 6. It’s slow to load and touch commands are slow to non existent. Does work a bit better on my iPad Air 4. Don’t usually write reviews but this is probably the most frustrating app I use. Hardly an improvement over the legacy app

Please Fix!. When you send someone an article to read, even if they are logged into the app of their device, when they click on the article you’ve sent them, it opens an internet tab and asks them to log in. If they want to read what you’ve sent them in the app they have to remember the name of the article then search it in the app search bar. Please fix this so when you send someone an article they can click it and it will open in their economist app.

Economist. As an ageing subscriber there is a tendency to switch off as the news is so depressing these days. Why is this so when as Hans Rosling says in his book Factfulness overall really things have never been better? What I remain determined to do is to continue to support The Economist, The Guardian and ABC, who have never been more important. As a former Economist I feel almost every rule in rational economic management has been broken over the past decade and more, and that eventually we will all pay a very high price for this.

Cheapest expensive subscription app. Cancelling a $51 subscription should not be difficult. Unfortunately the Economist makes this unnecessarily challenging for its users, and gives you the impression that you have unsubscribed, whilst your bank account is still being charged. Fix your web design and stop being sneaky. Users should have a right to easy opt out of a payed service and not resort to contacting a call centre, being put on hold and wasting their time after trying many times over many months to unsubscribe via the app and website.

Poor Audio Playlist. Dear Sir/Madam, I am writing to bring to your attention an issue I have encountered with your audio playlist for articles on the iPhone. The playlist extends so far down the screen that when I swipe up to exit the app and multitask, it inadvertently triggers the next article in the playlist. This is an incredibly frustrating experience, as no other iPhone app has ever accidentally triggered an action when swiping up. I reported this matter to your customer service, only to receive a response stating that swiping up is a feature on the iPhone. This, of course, is self-evident. I kindly request that you address this issue at your earliest convenience.

Economist audio. Most readers are very good - reading at a moderate pace that enables detail of reports to be easily absorbed. However, one of your female readers reads much too fast - I find I can’t absorb details of complex reports when she is reading them. App would be perfect if she could be persuaded to reduce her reading pace.

Terrible Customer Service. I am willing to pay such a high price for your articles because they are of high quality. But I don't understand why your customer service and subscription department is so sub par. How hard is it to change a student subscription from digital and print to digital only? It has taken me two email requests and three live chat enquires and over two months.. and still it is not settled. What makes it worse is that every single time your quote changes. It has ranged from 599 to 299 when your website clearly states 237. not to mention my subscription details changes without any notice just for me to find out after logging in. At this rate i'll just have to cancel my subscription.

Excellent Analysis; Ads in an Expensive Paid Subscription. I’ve continuously enjoyed the global (although most often through the lens of individual nation-states) perspective provided by The Economist, through both their excellent podcasts and the occasional hard-copy issue picked up from an airport magazine stand. I’d often tossed up paying the subscription fee despite the considerable expense, and in general, I’m glad to have done so - the analysis is erudite and broad in coverage. Regardless, I was stunned to still see large ads breaking up the text and impacting focus on the story at hand. To be asked to pay over A$300 (nearly A$500 if not a student) per year and still continuously see ads is pretty ridiculous; how much would it really cost each paying user to remove these? In all, despite a clear ‘hard centre’ ideological position on both economic and social issues, The Economist is an indispensable publication. However, I’d avoid paying a subscription fee if you dislike feeling short-changed.

Audio playback with unstable volume. Playing back “Nuclear family” this week, the audio playback dropped in volume and then a few moments later returned to normal. This volume adjustment occurred several times on this article and has occurred on others. It’s quite annoying as I need to then adjust the volume control up and then down manually. I’m posting here because I have never had a reply to a support email. So hopefully this receives more traction.

Terrible Customer Service. Great journalism; great publication/s. Absolutely dismal customer service and way behind the times for online customer tools. I have had a terrible experience shifting from Digital + Print to Digital only. I have been charged twice for a 3-year subscription and nobody replies to my complaints or to my screenshots of the charges. Go online, and there are no options to get any better service. Customer service experience is equivalent to gutter journalism in my experience. :)

Can’t restore purchase. I love the articles in the Economist, but now I can’t read them because the app won’t restore my subscription purchase. I use it on two iPads (work and home) and an iPhone - not in excess of device limit according to terms and conditions. I can’t register for digital access for multiple devices because iTunes account doesn’t provide CRN. I’ve looked through troubleshooting guides and FAQs. I’ve tried uninstalling and reinstalling, switching off and on again. Nothing works. Please fix.

App needs some bug fixes. App comments only - The Economist is very good and useful as ever, but two problems have emerged recently with the app regarding audio: - the in-app controls are very slow to respond - swiping up to switch apps from the Economist audio menu very often causes the track to switch to the World This Week / first track. These are probably related! It has only been noticeably this way for a month or two. Update, please!

So easy to use. I’m a new user of the Economist app. I’m most surprised by how easy it is to use. I can listen to the weekly paper and pause when I need a break. Then easily return to that same point in the narration. I can easily zoom the text size up and down depending on how tired my eyes are. And I can easily find articles of interest via search.

Better search and better favouriting needed. Searching: searching using the Economist app is pretty pointless. We need a better search tool. Maybe some type of ai search needed, better filtering and sorting options Favouriting: I need to be able to mass unfavourite/manage articles.

It’s really good. And the new fonts are amazing. Righto, we all know the economist is world classs journalism and analysis. And it makes you smarter. But now it is easier to read too. And not because they trended towards shorter sentences, which they did about 3 years ago. It’s because they change the type face, or font, to a new unique design. The change is subtle, unless you are really into fonts. But take it from a kerning nerd. This is big. Huge even. It looks amazing, and is so much easier to read. It now makes you smarter with less effort. Win win!

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Difficult to cancel. You have to chat with a bot to cancel. They try to find something else to sell you. I find this deeply disrespectful to consumers. My time has no value. My effort has no value. In fact, this is a passive way to keep subscriptions up. If you want to try this out to see if you’ll like it, don’t. It’s not worth the time and energy and frustration to get out later. Also, now wondering why the rating is so high, with the experience I just had?

Great journalism; garbage app. Articles are impossible to find. I sign in to read something I saw promoted elsewhere...and I never do get to read it. Not sure I’ll renew my subscription.

Good content, poor audio features. The content is great, and the daily stories have high caliber. The “3 star” rating is due to the poor podcasting/audio portion of the app

Great content - unethical marketing. I’ve always liked the content, and I had subscribed on the web. But I decided to cancel because I’m too busy to read it. I thought I might resubscribe when life wasn’t so hectic. The obnoxious rigmarole needed to cancel was appalling. Even after I instructed the agent (possibly AI) that I wanted to cancel, he wouldn’t answer the question, “Have you cancelled my subscription?” He kept trying to sell me products. I warned him I was getting angry, but he persisted. I told him that he was wasting my time and he answered, So, would you like… the following subscription deals? That’s an automatic, “Never again.”

Content good, app performance not so much. Content remains top notch as usual, but its failed by an app that is laggy or unresponsive to touch inputs. The podcasts section would also benefit from episode summaries/descriptions like on Apple’s Podcast app. Update: the 4.0 update has mercifully made the app snappier and as responsive as one would expect.

When the next update?. App crashes non-stop. Impossible to read a full article. This is becoming ridiculous.

Great content but sluggish app. I tried reading an article today. Crashed 4 times before I gave up. Tried cancelling my subscription and the website was defective, had to chat for 15 minutes to get it done. I’m out. Old- The content is worth the subscription, but this is by far the worst news app. It keeps on freezing, lagging and crashing. To the point where I hesitate renewing my subscription.

Great content but poor performance. Nothing to say about the high quality of journalistic content. But for a few months already accessing past editions never worked first shot before the app shutdown. Strangely a few app updates didn’t fix it.

V 4.6.0 is a big disappointment in many ways. The updated iPad app (v 4.6.0) lacks many features I liked in the previous version. I liked being able to zoom in on an embedded picture or illustration for viewing details (no longer possible in the updated version). Please allow users to easily enlarge the text. why all the empty margin space on the both sides (on the iPad in landscape mode)? In general this update lacks useful features and a creative interface.

Using the app to read news. Sorry, but I prefer by far to read on a paper copy. It less staining for the eyes and… the mind😉 Elisabeth Rigault

Excellent magazine!. I am enjoying the Economist tremendously, but as a teacher I’d like to see a dedicated section on Education on this app. It would help streamline the topics I’d like to read first. Cheers Earle

Worst app experience I've ever had. Constantly lagging, not responding, crashes multiple times a day usually. I love the content of the Economist, but this app is borderline unusable at times.

V4 - Delivering Less. I love the Economist but the new version 4 of the app was released too soon. They initially did not have the ability to change the size of the text, now I’m noticing you can’t gift articles. The new app doesn’t deliver any new experience but just provides less functionality. What’s the point of a new version if it’s not refreshed?

Very clunky app. I have the newest version of the iPad, and almost exclusively use it to read the Economist. Very slow transitions, glitchy off-line performance and fast battery draining glitchy on-line performance. Perhaps decouple the audio as a forced download feature and use a less resource draining ad page program. Kinda nutso for a magazine like Economist to have such a terrible iPad interface. Such a disservice to the awesome journalism.

I miss the old app. Why get rid of the super user friendly app and create a new one? It used to be so easy, just one click and I have the whole weekly issue on audio downloaded and ready to go

Repeatedly asked for login credentials. Love economist articles. Their system doesn’t hold my login info therefore it asks me for user name and password every day when I login using iPhone 11 with mobile app. Should have Keep me logged in option.

1 month trial showing as 1 week on purchase screen. That looks very deceptive. Can it be addressed and I can then change the rating and subscribe?

Text Selection Issues. At some point recently, the app introduced a completely non-standard behaviour when tapping and hold on text. Please bring back the standard behaviour, used in pretty much every other app, that allows for normal lookup, search, and copying.

UX and ads. I like the economist app, it’s easy to use and there’s definitely been solid improvement on the user experience over the years but there’s one major issue that really bothers me and that’s when I am scrolling down an article and tap on the ad by accident. I feel like the position of the ad is set in a way that the user is highly likely to tap on it and be led away to a 3rd party browser. It completely ruins the flow of reading and has in fact become so frustrating that I am taking the time to write a review about it. Can u please fix this :(

The best thing on my phone is the Economist. Joe Pavelka

Tragically Hip. A high hope into paradise.

Annoyingly pauses audio on opening. The Economist is a global treasure as a publication, but the app leaves much to be desired. One annoyance as of June 2024 is that the app pauses any playing audio when it is opened. Why? If I’m listening to a podcast or music and would like to peruse the Economist for its written content, it would be great if the app didn’t annoyingly pause the audio playing in another app. Please fix.

Great content, laggy app. The app sometimes freezes for several seconds when opening an article. Also when swiping back from an article to home page or the issue table of contents, the app often freezes in the middle of transition animation

Buggy App. I’m not sure why the best newspaper has the buggiest and jankyist app. It feels like it’s gotten worse over the months, please fix it. I may drop my subscription it’s getting so annoying.

Great newspaper, unreliable app. I love The Economist, but the app is pretty slow and crashes often. Sadly, this hasn’t gotten better over the years, it keeps getting worse.

Software deterioration. I’ve been using the app for many years, but in the last few months noticed the phone heating up and battery draining while using it. Today it crashed on me 4 times while I was trying to read a single article, which prompted this review.

Terrible for listening. For years I’ve listened to the economist on my daily commute (and kept the habit through COVID). As I’m sure many do, I read/listen to pretty much the same sections every time, so the ability to add entire sections to a “playlist” easily, to then listen in one go, was critical. But in this new version I have yet to find an easy way to do that. It would seem I have to go to each article and click to listen. Not only is that annoying, but it makes it impossible to (safely) listen to it while driving. Please help if I’m missing something!

App keeps crashing. The mobile app keeps crashing abruptly while reading articles.

Great newspaper another lousy app.. For 20 years I have enjoyed reading the Economist but consistently found the user interface to be wanting. Trend continues.

Text size is not there yet. See how ebook apps manage text sizes. Margins adapt too. Also the size is for the articles not the entire app. Not enough sizes, fall short when using a device with a big screen.

The legacy app is more reliable. I am now receiving notifications in the legacy app that it will no longer be supported. Meanwhile, the newer replacement app continues to offer a subpar experience. I can’t download a new issue for offline reading until the day after publication. And now, even though I was able to download the issue for today (Friday) on Friday, I can’t switch to it as my active issue. I filmed it as proof. Is there any quality control at The Economist?

I'm done with Economist app. I'm done. Failure to fix Weekly tab issues (constantly losing my place) and another big subscription price increase. I won't pay more for a crappy experience. Journalism is still first rate and I will miss it, but I won't miss the app experience. The Worst.Content remains excellent, 5-star. Original app was excellent. This app is now the worst app on my iPad. Open the app, I'm positioned on the correct article in edition I was reading, but wait 5-15 seconds (until app connects to server?) without doing anything, app jumps backward to a random previous article, or exits edition to home page. I've learned to not start reading right away but it is ridiculous that I must manually find my place where I left off last time. I guess nobody cares because I have reported this many times. Other issues: font size varies between articles, slow response to taps, too many ads that are slow to load, weird font choice for initialisms makes them difficult to read. Almost ready to ask for paper edition again. If the content ever starts to slip, I will be gone after 25+ years.

Subscription cancellation. Be aware that you cannot easily cancel your subscription. After submitting a cancellation request, the system asked why and I responded. Instead of cancelling, they offered a deal that I refused and I confirmed my intend to cancel. Again, instead of getting a cancelling confirmation, they responded they were sorry to hear that I’d like to cancel… Be careful: at this point, your subscription is not cancelled yet! I had to chat with an agent who proposed another deal instead of processing my cancellation request!!! I finally got a cancellation confirmation after 5-10 minutes of annoying chat.

A+++ Material. I love the Economist and have been a subscriber for years now. I wouldn’t want to receive my information on affairs from anywhere else than several publications and this is one of the trusted brand in news and media; and always will be by the looks of it.

App is the problem. Great content. Amazing writing. Unique perspective. The app is bloated, crashes, and has gotten slower and slower with time. Simplify! I want to read and listen to what you do!

Great App But.... I love this app but one issue that I wish would be changed is that opening the app does not pause my music. I don't often listen to news articles on the app, so it would be nice if you could set a default to turn off loading the audio bar at the bottom and the sound button at the top right corner.

App doesn’t remember where you left off. Compared to the legacy app (which is slowly degrading by losing access to some articles) this app forgets what you were reading almost every time you switch to another app. Then you have to switch to the weekly edition and scroll down to find the article and then scroll down the article to find where you were. It would also be nice to have a non-scrolling view of articles so that one can advance just by tapping the side (like in the kindle reader or iBook apps).

Need app for audio edition.. Really disappointed I have to use this app to listen to the audio edition. I’m glad they added 1.25x playback speed, but it doesn’t sound right compared to my usual player. It stutters and sounds distorted compared to importing the mp3 edition as an audiobook. Cannot block ads in the app even though I subscribe? I just want to use my web browser and mp3 download. Not a lot of liberty for a liberal magazine. - audio player crashes iOS 14 - audio player often does not remember playback position - cannot easily bring up audio player - audio cannot easily resume without opening the app PLEASE bring back the mp3 download for the audio edition. I will have to cancel my subscription if I cannot listen.

Terrible app from a great publication. Constantly crashes. Takes multiple attempts to click on any link. Honestly, the Economist should be embarrassed.

Great magazine, lousy 2020 app.. How can you go so wrong with an update. The new app is really unintuitive and difficult to navigate.

Terrible User Experience. For someone that only wants to read the weekly magazine the new app is just terrible. In your face options to listen. More clicks and a far less attractive page setup. Hopefully I am just reacting to it being very very different. But I don’t think so. I truly hate the new app. The magazine remains exceptional so this is an app only review.

Too much advertising. I already ready paid the subscription cost, but when I’m using this app, there are still advertisements in between of texts, which is surprisingly annoying. I understand that advertising is the main way of making profit, and I shouldn’t have judge advertising itself, but at least put it at the bottom. Economist is a great magazine, and a great reading experience should be prioritized.

Overheats my phone. While the content is very good and the app used to be good, it now consumes a lot of CPU, makes my phone hot, burns up my battery, is occasionally slow or stalls. My current phone is an iPhone 13 mini. The app used to work well on much less capable phones like the iPhone 6,7,8, and SE. The Espresso app is similar. I’m using the website until this gets fixed.

Crashes. The app has become unusable. It has crashed three times on me trying to read an article today. This happens more often now. The app is slow on responding to taps and freezes as well. It has gotten much worse over the last releases. I subscribe to digital only and need an app that works!!

Finally an update that works. I used to get so frustrated with the Economist app because it’s slow, reloads all the time when you switch to another app and basically is useless when you go from an internet zone to one without internet. I’m happy that the update from this week actually seemed to have dramatically improved these issues. Not sure why it took like >5 years to fix but better late than never.

Terrific paper but the app gets worse and worse and worse. Yesterday's "improvement": graphics and text moving all over the page, to generate visual noise that makes reading difficult. -- The previous app usually opened to where you were reading and, when it did not, the table of contents was a concise outline that let you find articles easily. This app loses your place and the contents section is an interminable list swollen by superfluous pictures. Within a story, elephantine pictures fill the screen when you try to scroll past them and your finger doesn't land just right. The latest "improvement" is animated pictures that do nothing but distract from the text and annoy.

I’m so sick of that spinning circle. Articles are great, but app sucks. I have articles downloaded, but if senses a weak connection, it won’t let me read them while it looks for new content. Also won’t let me rotate and read sideways to better view charts and maps.

Poor customer support (updated). The content is good and the app is fine except - it has a bug and when I tried to point it out, I received poor responses from customer support. The Espresso section is missing from the app (accessing from iPhone SE in Canada). I pointed it out with all the details about the app three times but the customer support team kept assuming I am wrong (I have the wrong app or that I don’t have the latest version, etc.). Despite me trying to explain they kept assuming I have the wrong info. I was only trying to help but it doesn’t look it I could. Update: clearing cache process (as described by customer support with a reply to my rating) didn’t work.

Great magazine. Terrible 2020 update. Great magazine but the recent update makes it awful to use

Why is it so laggy?. I’m paying nearly $30 CAD for this subscription. There is absolutely no reason for this app to still be so laggy. Why do I have to click a link on the app 10 times before it moves to the next article? :( I love you guys I just wanna see you succeed. :((

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Version 3.0 does not work well across devices. The magazine is certainly quite good, but unfortunately since the 3.0 version of the app was released my bookmarks do not work properly between my iPhone and my iPad. I used to bookmark articles on my phone during the day, and then read them at night on my iPad, but now it’s impossible (each device has its own bookmarks now). Customer support gave me some indications but they have not worked for me, and they gave me no further help. I hope The Economist can fix this soon! Let me know if I can do something to help. Jonathan

Great news service, middling app. The quality of writing and editing in The Economist is quite high. Articles are informative and often with a little bit of wit to keep things entertaining. I’ve been a subscriber for about five years and will continue for the foreseeable future. The app is stable but has a few nagging issues that have been present for some time. If they push a new set of featured articles to the app whatever you are reading gets replaced. It’s as if articles are stored by index and you’re reading whatever is in position x rather than a particular article. It has also started duplicating paragraphs on occasion.

I miss being able to select audio playlist!. The content is fantastic. This review pertains to the new app. I primarily read articles by listening, and excellent playlist features have been removed: One used to be able to download only selected individual articles, which was essential for hands-free listening. The only way to listen to individual articles now is to open the written article and tap “Listen to this story”. The playlist also used to check off where one left off so one could resume listening with a quick glance, and easily remove listened-to content.

app quality. SIR- The new app is simply excellent. The rewrite has succeeded in transforming the app from a digital version of the weekly newspaper into a full fledged source of news, catering not only to the times I feel like reading in-depth analysis from the issue’s front to back. The linked articles at the end of each article allow me to wander around and read based on topic even if the linked articles are from a previous issue. The in-built espresso function is also appreciated, creating another mode of news consumption that will again serve as a jumping off point to further reading. Dom Some Guy, Austin

Great content, careless execution. 10+ years user of this app and it’s predecessors and it’s been the same story with all: great content, buggy, careless execution. Images fail to download, state isn’t kept so you always have to navigate to where you left off, audio features great on paper but never work. Every release is marred by crazy and obvious bugs that suggest something is seriously wrong with their QA. Customer service excels at writing meaningless emails but is otherwise worthless. Bottom line is this app works more or less but, like a toddler, will always have you work for it. The iPad version has been useless ever since they moved to this “responsive” version years ago.

Well-written and insightful international news. I have been enjoying reading the economist for over 30 years, and I continue to marvel at how well produced and written the magazine, and the news are. Through the Economist, I get international news that I would receive nowhere else. I get insight into happenings in central Africa and the Pacific Islands and the far reaches of the Earth. I read obituaries of fascinating people that I’ve never heard of and wish I had known more about. I catch up on global economics and I’m always fascinated by the latest publication of the big Mac index. Here in the states, our local and domestic news is composed of meager sound bites and we can’t get much international news, unless we seek it. If you are seeking international news, the Economist is the place to go. Do yourself a favor and try reading The Economist for a while. I find it worth my time and money to be a subscriber.

Feedback from a subscriber of 25 years. I don’t care for the guest columns (“By Invitation”). We all read the Economist because we like the Economist writers. The guest columnists generally disappoint because they tend not to share the Economist worldview. In fact, you seem to choose guest columnists that differ from your editorial line by design. But we subscribe to the magazine because we generally prefer the Economist’s worldview to that of its relativist and appeaser critics, too many of whom seem to be appearing as guest columnists. I think it’s an innovation too far. Thank you.

Actual News. The Economist provides at your fingertips real news. Instead of free clickbait, a jingoistic echo chamber, or Neo-Marxist philosophy you get material that will inform you, surprise you, inspire you, make you laugh, and sometimes even bring a tear to your eye. The Economist isn’t the news you want to hear, it’s the news you need. It has transformed the way in which I see the world, made me a better worker, manager, citizen, husband, and father. The world would be better off if everyone read it, and for this reason, I recommend you read it too.

Great app, one suggested feature for audio. I’d like to just hit ‘play’ on the bookmarked articles with audio and keep working through my list as I’m walking or driving. The app is missing a way to just play audio from my bookmarked articles without having to go back and hit ‘play’ on the next bookmarked article. After it plays my first bookmarked article, it plays an unrelated ‘Leaders’ article, which is a bit unexpected. But I still love the app and am happy with my subscription. The Economist is truly my most interesting news publication. It often helps me understand the world in a slightly different way.

Good app, audio article support needed. Overall this is a solid app. It’s reliable, and the interface is clean and intuitive. However, the option to play the audio versions of individual articles from the weekly publication does not yet exist in the app; it is available on the web version. I would like to see this feature implemented in the app. There is the option to listen to podcast shows of course, just not the articles from the magazine. The content itself is thoughtful and the dedication to puns and wordplay is incredible. I think we all know the OECD is “a club of mostly rich countries” by now, so it might do to spare the ink.

A big improvement over previous version. (NB: I am and have long been a big fan of the content from the Economist. This review concerns only the apps from this publication, specifically on iPad) When the Economist recently (I think back in 2017) “updated” their app, moving from paginated articles to more trendy, endlessly scrolling articles, I thought it was a huge step in the wrong direction. It looked like a cheap, generic app, with many bugs and shoddy UI. For instance, there was no way to jump to another section in one week’s issue, and bookmarking was confusing. I still miss pagination on iPad (call me old fashioned but I think this is the best way to present magazine articles), but this new app version is a vast improvement. Better look, better UI, easy bookmarks that sync between iPad and iPhone. Jump to sections easily. Daily content in addition to the weekly issues. Easy audio downloads. With that said, I highly recommend this app.

Spectacular. The Economist continues its tradition of being one of the best newspaper in the market. Its coverage is global, thoughtful, and insightful. The addition of podcasts makes it stronger. And the ability to listen to every article means I can get to everything, even if I cannot read it all. Politically, I am on the right, The Economist seems strong center, but I nonetheless find its essays persuasive on some issues, a testament to its ethical journalism. High praise in this world. If I was ever limited to one publication to read, I would easily choose The Economist.

Love the substance, hate the app. I chose to use the app for promising features, most importantly for me, the ability to see which articles I’ve read. Despite many glitches, this feature has worked ok, until yesterday when I lost all check marks at the bottom of articles I’ve read. This is incredibly frustrating because I am always working off of several issues at once as I try to completely read past issues, keep up with daily read, and read the time-relevant updates from new issues. Please fix this and I’ll change my rating to 5-stars.

Do not purchase Subscription through Apple. I recently purchased a one-year subscription for $299 through Apple. However, when I logged into the website, it showed that I didn't have an active subscription. I tried deleting the app and restoring the purchase, but I still couldn't access the website. When I contacted The Economist's customer support, they informed me that they couldn't assist because they have no visibility into purchases made through Apple. They suggested I purchase a subscription directly from their website instead. This experience has been incredibly frustrating. It's disappointing that a company would treat its paying customers this way. This is not how business should be conducted.

Buggy isn’t better. The Economist is my favorite news source but the app is my least favorite app. The app repeatedly fails to update its content. Tech support’s instructions to reload and refresh provide relief for one or two days before the app crashes again and won’t update content. I’m happy to pay for some of the best journalistic content available, but the app is a failed delivery system and waste of money. If the app developers were on the same level as the content writers this would be a 5-star + news delivery service.

Only review I’ve ever written. The Economist is THE news outlet for being informed without getting too emotionally charged. They avoid verbose hyperbole while also being sure to avoid making grand assumptions based on directional leanings; this they allow the reader to determine at their own discretion. A great variety of topics by sensational journalists harbored worldwide. The perfect combination of brevity and depth. A sensational outlet that I have been reading for almost a decade, starting in late high school. Not too esoteric for younger readers or otherwise-specialized academics. Sign up!

Great articles! Let’s stay positive.... The Economist is there for us to grasp the fundamentals that bring this world together and make it spin on daily basis. It is great to read and listen and trust its content. Surely, for me, its articles are like an immersion into never ending learning. Keep going! One suggestion is to try -every now and then- to show the good things about this world on macro geopolitical and societal topics. Sometimes, I feel that the tone of the conglomerate of articles tend to be too negative, although realistic. For me, often the glass if half full, and I am sure The Economist can see the world this way as well. By being positive, we can always influence our followers :)

Excellent journalism but the app is way too slow. These ratings are only for the app. I love the economist news reporting but their app on ios is terribly slow. Its take 2 min just to click the weekly issues tab and scroll to your last article. The article page automatically refreshes if I lose internet for a second and then I need to remember which line I was on. Even switching tabs to check a new email for a second and the whole app refreshes and I need to start again. After I supposedly download the weekly issue, still the data graphs and other images need internet to load offline which makes no sense. The economist would do well investing in a better engineering team and redesign of the app

Steadily sinking in quality. Apart from the horrible design and persistent audio playback issues that went on for months, now the article readers’ quality is going down. There’s no excuse for this especially considering the cost of subscription. Readers used to be good but lately are more annoying than pleasant to listen to. This includes some new guy who can barely read and sounds like some taxi driver from East London with a heavy accent. I understand that this may well be because of “diversity and inclusion“ but what I say to that is that quality still matters. What the economist doesn’t understand is that I don’t want to listen to that kind of voice and that kind of reading because it’s very unpleasant. Canceling my subscription.

Good app, still some bugs. The app hasn’t been super stable but mostly usable. I especially like the “streaming” feature so you don’t have to download each issue as in the other app (Classic US, I think that’s the name). Every update brought some bugs and fixed some. Considering the version number of 1.x, it is probably expected. Ever since 1.5.1, I can’t access the previous editions from my iPhone X. Would appreciate it if you could please fix this soon! Update: there is a workaround to get the previous editions back. You have to delete the app and then reinstall it. But it really shouldn’t be like this way.

Overall good, but not great. Overall good, but unfortunately has some bugs that keep it from being 5 star. - app hangs whenever returning to an audio story when I left off part of the way through. I can’t go back to the beginning, I have to start playing another story first. - not a bug, but I really wish I could choose the playback controls. With podcasts, I can rewind or fast forward ~15 seconds, which is particularly useful when I’m listening while I walk (I can tap my AirPods or use my watch). When I do that in the economist app, it goes to a different article entirely, which I don’t want.

Great content, but the app needs work. Hello, I chose to subscribe to The Economist because I like the content and because of the ability to play the audio for the weekly magazine articles. I like to listen to the articles as I eat my breakfast and prepare my coffee in the morning. Here are a few of the issues that I wish could be fixed and also some suggestions for things that would make the app better. 1. The app doesn’t reliably put a check mark on the articles that I’ve played. Sometimes it will, sometimes it won’t. 2. The audio player menu crashes a lot 3. The app signs me out and tells me to subscribe even when I’ve already subscribed and signed in. 4. It’d be nice if the espresso morning briefing had a play button so that I could listen to that as audio as well. I love this magazine so far because of all the great content it has and I really hope these issues are addressed in an update. I also really really like being able to listen to the articles. Thanks.

Top notch content but a few control options would be nice. The Economist has content second to none and it is fairly easy to access with the well-designed app. I particularly enjoy the audio content. I only wish there were slightly better options for playback. At top of my list would be options to play back at speeds between 1.0 and 1.25. To my ear the best speed would be around 1.1 depending on the narrator. And this would save me 10% of time! Additionally it would be nice to list total time of an issue and total time remaining.

Essential reading and great app overall - audio issues. I love The Economist and recommend it highly to anyone interested in staying informed and learning about global issues. The app itself is overall very good. It’s sleek and easy to navigate. However, 4 stars because the new podcast section isn’t great. The player is very clunky - unresponsive controls, no queue, no episode notes, etc. For some reason you can’t tap an episode title to play it. The audio edition of the magazine (which I also love) suffers from the same UI issues. It seems to me that the audio component was an afterthought, which is a shame since the content is so good.

Excellent app, but.... I absolutely love the redesign and consolidation of the various economist apps into one. The only issue I’m having is the ability to access the current edition on Friday morning (central-time USA reader here) - though it shows that there is a new “current edition”, it sometimes takes upwards of thirty minutes for the app to properly register the new edition. Whenever I tap it, it just takes me back to last week’s release. Also, the auto-download feature of the new audio doesn’t seem to ever work for me. Other than those minor inconveniences, I have no complaints! Keep up the great work and reporting!

Excellent content, slower than expected. I am very happy with the Economist content, and appreciate the additional access having an app provides. I have noticed a few bugs and performance issues that could be improved: -There is a lag when navigating to a new page (with the exception of articles themselves) before links can be used. -When I have been swiping to move through articles and then the app closes, upon reopening I am briefly shown the article I had been reading, before it goes back to the most recent article accessed from a link. -The acronym FBI is rendered as “fbI”.

Impeccable journalism with an app to match. The Economist doesn’t need my endorsement of the quality of their journalism. It speaks for itself. Rather, I’ll comment that their app is wellAdesigned and refreshing to use. Their developers have made large leaps in the past several years to make the interface less buggy and more focused. I love being able to easily download entire editions, listen to articles with real narrators, and search for past articles. I have no complaints. Some uses complain of the ads, but I’d encourage you to hold your criticism. Media companies cannot survive on subscription fees alone—that’s been largely true since their inception. I suppose that makes me an ad-apologist, but if these ads enable the high-quality journalism we all love, then I feel we should grin and bear the ads. And for what it’s worth, I’ve never found the ads to be particularly distracting.

Slow app. Not sure what updates were made about a month or two ago, but the app is now very slow to open, start playing stories, and switch stories. It can literally take 20-30 seconds for the app to register that I’ve initiated an action. I’ve also noticed a lot more crashes, both while a story is playing, and after a story finishes and is queuing the next. At that point, the app just shuts down. Unfortunately, this isn’t tenable, especially while I’m listening in the car. The audio version gives me the flexibility to “read” the articles that I’m paying for, and if not fixed soon, I’ll probably just cancel my subscription.

How Can a Premier Publication Have such an Inept App?. I have used The Economist iPad app for decades. It has generally been miserable software. Let me give one example: Can the software remember where I left off? For many years, it was completely clueless. A few years ago, there was substantial improvement, and it generally recalled where I stopped. A few weeks ago, however, it lost its memory. Can software have Alzheimer’s? Now, when I open the app, it shows me the correct location for a fraction of a second then jumps 5 to 7 articles earlier. Every time I want to read The Economist, I need to flip forward multiple articles. Just one example of many.

Economist App Review. It’s very good. I feel like the search function used to be better, though. I used to be able to search any keyword about an article I knew I’d read in the past that was relevant to something I was speaking with a colleague or friend about, and the exact article I had read from years before popped up. In the past few weeks, maybe one or two months, I feel like something has changed. Now when I search a keyword I get some articles that might be relevant, but they just don’t seem to be as exactly what I was looking for as before.

The economist is great. You know, it’s the Economist. This the most complete and intellectually arresting news magazine in English…by far. With this magazine you’ll get data driven and analytically sharp coverage of world events, technology, financial markets, and long term trends in geopolitics. The prose is precise and the sense of irony delightful. The free market liberal perspective is an oasis of sanity in a world where common sense is, to coin a phrase, an increasingly scarce resource. The app is easy to navigate. I read the print edition but use it sometimes to follow breaking news and check in on next weeks edition.

Why did they change this??. The old app was the gold standard for magazine apps. The functionality was perfect and let me immerse myself in each week’s magazine with no other distractions, so it felt much closer to the print version. Now the menu bar at top is always visible allowing me to click back to “this week.” I want that to go away when I scroll down/read. And it shouldn’t refer me back to “this week”—that’s a section of the magazine. It’s confusing to call the magazine part of the app that as well. Also, I never ever listen to the audio version. So why do I have to see it on each page? I just don’t get why you’d mess with perfection. I’d use the “classic” app, but apparently it doesn’t recognize my economist subscription? So frustrating.

I love the Economist But Cancelled. I’ve been subscribing to the Economist off an on since I was 18, I’m now 46. There is no doubt that their product is superior, however I still stopped. Why? The reasons are several but the primary variable impacting my choice is the hurdles to subscribing. They have an odd rate structure that feels very print media, you can’t go monthly via the App Store which also means you need to contact them to cancel. It’s a hassle. I want it easy. I turn on and off subscriptions about once a year. So I dropped them and I do miss them but not enough to overcome the hassle. Make it easy.

Simply The Best. I have been a subscriber to The Economist since 1973 when I graduate from law school. Back then the US subscription was printed on “Onion skin” light Air Mail paper. It usually took 4-6 days to arrive from the UK. In 1973 The Economist was the most “unique” periodical that I ever read and that is still the case in 2023. Buried in fine print at the bottom of the Contents page is the “Creed” of The Economist ….Published in September 1843 to take part in …”a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” The Economist of 1973 and 2023 remain faithful to its founding principle of 1843.

I love the app BUT. I am a great fan of the app, but I personally would like to request two improvements. I mostly use this app for the audio and I’d Economist even more if the two followings were possible. 1. Can we make our own playlist for the audio? For instance I want to skip letter section when I’m listening and it’s frustrating that there’s no way to do so but manually. 2. Can you please introduce sleep timer? Listening to the economist audio and going to bed has been my habit but now I need to turn them off manually and this hasn’t been great.

Love The Economist!. I get updates throughout the day on my phone about developments. I treasure more than anything the iconoclastic independent take on many issues.. it does not view issues from the cozy ease of center left or center right of many publications. The Economist informs me of key developments and tends from around the world and how they affect each other. I love the slightly sarcastic voice I detect at times. When I was teaching middle school, high school and college students I would use articles from The Economist to both inform students and to show the best use of the English language.

Terrible app, but content is good. The app is terrible. They just didn’t take the time to think through the basics of a reading app. Every time you close your phone and reopen, you need to manually start from the beginning, navigate to the issue you are reading, navigate back to the article you were reading, and then find the place in the article you left off. It absolutely drove me nuts when on a 10 hour flight where I was constantly back and forth between reading and kids. It’s a problem the rest of the time too. Nobody would use the Kindle app if it did this. Makes me wonder how this app got high ratings. Of course, the Economist is excellent content, but since this rating is for the app, I’m focusing on the app itself.

First rate journalism, visual disaster. The economist remains one of the best sources of news anywhere, so it’s a real shame just how much they’ve lost their way from a design perspective. This has to be one of the least attractive news apps I’ve ever seen. I’m sure a lot of time and money went into developing the new app/website, but it just looks awful. Backgrounds are different shades of gray and white (and dark mode is even worse), weekly stories are presented as just one long list with no attempt at design or layout, and no thought seems to have gone into the use of blank space/ margins or the visual coherence of the app. What’s worse, the old version of the app—and the website for that matter—were a model of clean, uncluttered design.

Long time reader. I love the content and the app. The audio component of the app makes digesting an entire issue much easier, especially on a long commute or while doing chores at home. I read the bits that I want to and listen to the rest. The new “que” function makes putting together your listening list each week much easier, especially if you know which parts you want to listen to. I debated the Kindle subscription versus using the app and the app just has so much more functionality for me.

Can manage but audio version could be better. I access each week’s edition mostly through the audio version while jogging outdoors. I would like an easy way to download the audio version each week using WiFi, place at the end of the playlist, and start the playing later. So far the only way I have found to approximate this is to delete previous editions and then download the new one. Also, while listening, after another app interrupts, such as incoming phone call, the Economist does not automatically resume playing on the iPhone.

Rediscovered my love of The Economist through this app!. This app is everything I could have wanted from The Economist! The app layout allows you to navigate an issue exactly as you would a physical copy of the magazine, and the features allowing you to see which articles have been read and the minute length of each article are brilliant. And the ability to download issues for offline reading is great! Thank you Economist team for helping me rediscover my love of your physical magazine through app form!!

The app has too many issues. First it has no memory: I am unable to resume reading from where I left: when I switch or walk away from an article and come back, it resets to main window. Yes I remember what I was reading earlier today but it is annoying to refind from main window. This app is supposed to be the reader of the newspaper. Second, the audio option has many bugs: e.g: you can’t even see the queue. You say “clear the queue” but it does not. When you build audio queue the sequence from the newspaper is not followed (US section should not begin with Lexington column). I did stick with the Legacy app-was much better- and the Apple Podcast option (no longer available). It sounds like this app developer never finished the project since at least 3 years…

App is really unresponsive. I love the economist as a publication but their app is getting on my nerves. I don’t really get this issue with any other apps, but this one is unresponsive and freezes up often. On an iPhone 12 Pro which is aging and does not always perform perfectly to be fair, but this app in particular: - I’ll have to hit the “back” arrow or article links over and over to get it to register a tap - often in articles I’ll try to scroll and won’t be able to scroll for five seconds or so - doesn’t load the articles in on launch for several seconds, and doesn’t have a load animation or any indication that the articles I’m seeing aren’t the current ones. Meanwhile I’m tapping an article wanting to read it and then “poof” it’s replaced. Can’t tell if this is bad engineering or a bad phone, but judging by all the other perfect reviews maybe my phone is partly the culprit? I use several other apps like chrome and discord regularly and never have performance issues at all though. Running 3.59

Terrible for audio/ need to fix auto-rotation. I like to listen to the weekly edition while exercising. This app takes far too long to download each edition and, when trying to play audio, it goes into a nearly endless “loading” loop that takes up to 15 minutes to figure out where it left off the preceding day before it starts playing again. I had to revert to the legacy app, which doesn’t have these problems and works smoothly. And this new app doesn’t allow us to rotate the cartoon or other images so we can see them in larger landscape mode, as the old app does. That means I can’t read the tiny text in the cartoon (which is unaffected by font size selection) or some other graphics and still need to look at the old app to get everything I overpaid for.

A Source I Can Trust. I’ve been reading the Economist for more than 40 years. I read it when I was conservative republican in my mid-thirties. I read it today in my seventies as a democrat. Despite the fact that my own views have shifted over time, I have always been able to depend on the Economist to give it to me straight—without the hyperbole, bias or the desire to shock, enrage or terrify that so many other news sources use to attract and retain reader/viewers. What a relief. I love being able to read The Economist without the need to activate the filters I use when reading or viewing other news sources.

News great, Ads not so great. The content and reporting from the Economist is top notch as usual. However a new ad system was implemented where a simple touch of an ad will force the advertisement content to open in my default browser. They have been set to be overly sensitive and don’t discriminate vs a tap with intent and one that’s simply just to scroll further down the page. This has created a horrendous user experience as I’m constantly having to switch back to the app after ungraciously been redirected to an ad I have no interest in. This is a recent issue, where they began by showing advertisements for their own offerings. And now I assume after compiling the rigged conversion rates to be able to pitch to advertisers ad space they are showcasing external third party ads.

Broken - Then fixed!. The weekly edition stopped updating. I reinstalled the app to see if that would make a difference. Now the app literally does not load any content. Just blank screens. For the amount I pay for an economist subscription, this is a huge disappointment. Guess I’ll be canceling, since the whole point of getting a subscription was to access the (very fine) audio edition… but the app prevents me from doing that. Update: The devs promptly fixed the issue. Well done, team! From one to five stars.

Please post world events faster. The way the economist writes about world events is good and I like how they analyse world events after something happened, but maybe they can have a section that could predict things and give an opinion about, say, the Stockmarket or inflation or before a speech give the possible outcomes of that speech. I think that that would be a great way to add content and not have the same articles sit on the front page for a day. While I realize that this is a newspaper, I just believe that this could really help with the content of the economist and make this app more engaging. Thanks.

Great reporting, annoying ads. The Economist has almost always had great reporting (with a few exceptions), which I would give five stars. But their new app needs to be designed better. It is extremely annoying to see ads now embedded in every article of the Weekly. In the earlier version of the app, the ads used to come when you first opened the magazine. Please go back to that format. I don’t want to see Facebook type of ads in a magazine I’m paying a monthly subscription for that costs more than Netflix.

Audio big problems. Clicking on play plays a different article?. Same exact review I gave about a year ago. It keeps getting more and more complicated. Keep it simple. This is a magazine app. I want to read and listen to the story’s. Not make a custom playlist. A skip button is sufficient I shouldn’t have to learn how to make a playlist to listen to the first article in the issue. I click play and it plays some old article. I just want easy plug and play. If this keeps up I’m unsubscribing. This app used to be fabulous. But now it takes ages to just play a new article and it keeps having to re download the same articles. It’s incredibly slow and doesn’t seem to function.