NPR: National & Local News App Reviews

Inconsistent Playback and Instability. For years the NPR app has proven to have unreliable playback. During my commute in the morning, I add “Morning Edition” to the play list and in the evening commute home, I’ll do that same for “All Things Considered”. The app often stops playing after a story is finished yet there are still several stories left in the playlist. More often, I’ll find that the next story that is played starts somewhere in the middle rather than at the beginning. It almost seems that UIDs for stories are cached and that a previously UID (or not so unique, rather) is reused and I’ve skipped or jumped to the next story before, this new story pics up where the previous UID’d story left off. (That’s just a guess). Regardless of the reason, I often get so frustrated with the NPR app that I switch to Apple Podcasts, Pandora or NPR One rather than continue using this app. This has literally gone on for YEARS! I wish NPR would get just their s4*t together and make and app as good as their news coverage is. Right now, the app is well below expectations.

The things I loved are gone.... You moved/removed my cheese. I thought the previous versions were simple to navigate. I use the iPhone app every day and multiple times each day. Now I’m struggling to find the stories and programs I used to easily browse and either read or add in my playlist. However, the most frustrating loss is the inability to create a list of favorite radio stations that I could easily go to and select. As an example, If I missed Morning Edition in my time zone I could go to another NPR station in a time zone 3-6 hours away to listen there. Now I can only select and list a single radio station, no ability to create a quick to reference favorites list. So each time I want to switch I have to remember the station ID or city, search for it and then select it. This app is nearly useless to me now. I contribute to WAMU, WABE, WGBH AND KCRW every year because I frequently listen to each. Your app re-designer has failed people like me. I’ll be installing one of the internet radio apps and using it instead - BOO

Quality content that’s hard to access. Much of the basic functionality of the previous app has been removed. I especially miss the ability to build a playlist. Now, you’re stuck listening to specific programs in the order they are presented. Finding programming is more annoying too. They have these little icons for each show in the On Demand section, and it’s hard to tell which is Weekend Edition Saturday and Weekend Edition Sunday because the icons are too small. (I figured that they are alphabetically ordered.) More importantly, the app doesn’t interface with iOS controls nearly as well. I often finding myself having to log into the app to get it replaying after pausing it, instead of just pressing play from the Lock Screen. The app is extremely slow refreshing, sometimes not refreshing at all, so that I have to close it by hand and reopen in order to get the latest Newscast. Please God stop with the advertisements for NPR One. I don’t want NPR One, I just want to make playlists myself.

Latest update ruined the app. I just started using the updated NPR One app. One thing I like to do in the app is keep tabs on multiple NPR stations that have programming I enjoy and local news from places I am connected to. You can no longer do that in the new version. You can choose one station, identified as your local station, and stream that. You can no longer save a list of favorite stations. So every time I want to switch stations, I have to go through the process to choose my local station and find the station all over again and select it. I have to do it again to go back to a different station. Why would I want to do all of that? Some of the stations I like listening to have their own apps, and I might just use those instead. Also, the landing screen and all of the other screens are so cluttered with information about podcasts or curated content that they think I might want to listen to that I can’t actually find the stuff I DO want to listen to. But here’s the thing: the things I want to listen to are on a few different stations. I can find my favorite podcast more easily on my podcast app. So I don’t see any reason to use NPR One anymore.

Speed control is a game changer. The addition of speed control has made this my go-to audio app. In combination with article-level playlisting, speed control has unlocked the richness of NPR’s unparalleled daily news programs. I can’t thank you all enough for finally making this change that is a major positive life enhancement. I simply did not have the time to listen to NPR’s daily news shows at the default glacial pace. I’ve heard legends about Byzantine internal politics at NPR that hindered this obvious feature (eg, local member stations not wanting to have a more functional version of the news shows out there for fear of their old-timey broadcasts being threatened; entrenched editors/hosting viewing themselves as artistes who arrogated for themselves the right to dictate a uniform pace for audio playback). If any of those stories were true, many thanks for cutting through the organizational noise and putting listeners first.

Possibly the Worst App Build of All Time. Whoever was in charge of the project to build this appshould not only be fired, but they should be dragged in front of all the NPR employees, have the stripes ripped from their shoulders, their sword snapped in two across the knee of some enforcer, and be sent alone out the gates of the fort out into the wilderness, never to be seen or heard from again. Seriously, this work should bring shame to the entire family of whomever turned it in as a complete project. I like to fall asleep to talk. Especially any kind of science story. So with that in mind NPR’s app should easily be in my top ten and maybe it would be, had they bothered to build an app. Want to make a playlist of the stories you’re interested in? Well, there’s some buttons that will take you, step by step, through all the sensations of picking out your own stories and putting them in the order you choose, but that’s about where it ends. Half the time, the “playlist” stops after the first story. Great a playlist of one, yay? The other half the time, when it does continue to the next story, it starts about 2/3 of the way. This would be useful, we’re I only interested in the end of a story. Unfortunately, as much as I appreciate a good landing, I need the context. This app is so poorly made it’s offensive.

Hate the new update!!!. Hey NPR, ever heard of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”. The new update is terrible! I used to be able to save several local NPR stations as favorites so that I could listen to a variety of programs since each local NPR station has different programming and schedules. Some have original programs unique only to that local station. By being able to have a list of favorite stations, I could easily & quickly stream the local NPR that I want & then be able to listen that station within a few seconds. If I didn’t like what I was listening to then l could easily switch to a different station on my favorites list. The new update only allows one station to be saved as primary when you go to “Live Radio”. I know I’m not the only one who is very unhappy the app changed. In fact, I’m among the many of the unhappy!! Please developers of this app, l advise and beseech you to listen & heed my review and the other reviews from other dissatisfied users so you can reincorporate the old features of the app that made it great!

Shockingly BAD update. I agree with all the other negative reviews. I wish I'd read them before my phone innocently updated so I could've kept the old app. My biggest issue is losing the search function. I often use the app to re-listen to a story I partially missed on the radio. The old search function was great for this. The horrible new app doesn't have a search function and the selection of stories by topic is so limited and cumbersome, I couldn't find several stories I'd heard earlier in the day, let alone any past days' stories. I really miss the old app. It had a lot of flexibility and functionality, like the much lamented playlists and ability to easily access programming from distant stations. I don't need to listen to my primary station through this app. They have their own app. I relied on the old app to curate my own listening when I wasn't engaged by my local station's programming. Full disclosure: I've always hated the NPR One app, and always resented that it wanted you to login with Facebook, etc. The wonderful old app was my refuge from NPR One. Now I feel like NPR has broken faith with me.

So many user experience flaws. I really want to this app to improve as I value easy access to the many terrific NPR programs and podcasts. But the current version has too many serious flaws and bugs that should have been obvious to the developers before it was launched. The inability to “favorite” particular programs is a huge oversight. To find a specific program that I listen to regularly, I’m forced to...click “On Demand” then scroll to “More NPR shows and programs” then click “More” the scroll to find my program (e.g. NPR Politics) then click that. Then click the latest show. Six distinct steps. Every time. To listen to a single show. I listen to “Live Radio” daily, and typically one of the three local NPR stations. There is an option to save a station as “Primary”. One would expect this would save that station. Nope. No idea why this option is presented, because I need to choose a station every time. And despite the fact I have location services enabled for the app, I’m forced to click the “Find stations near me” button every time. If I’m on LTE vs WiFi, I don’t get an accurate list. And, as many others have mentioned, the removal of the playlist feature that was available in previous versions is a huge disappointment. The look and feel of the app is clean and modern - but it feels as though there was a serious failure to adequately user test this release.

Miss the old app. I don’t write reviews often, but the disparity between the recently revised NPR app and the old version is too great to ignore. The old app, while less ‘modern’ looking, felt less rigid, more customizable, and less cumbersome to use. The utility I miss the most was the ability to create playlists from stories from various NPR programs into one stream, and have that stream auto-play from one story to another. Now, if one plays an individual story in Morning Edition, for instance, it does not auto-play the next story; one has to go back into the app and manually play the next story or the entire program must be played in order for a “playlist” to be created. It’s cumbersome and sometimes dangerous, particularly while listening on the road. I can fathom that this system forces the listener to listen to 1) more ads (which seem to be auto-generated in between stories and could not be before with self-created playlists), and 2) more stories (forcing the listener to listen the entire program instead allowing the ability to choose). Please bring back the functionality of the old app. I have spent the better half of this morning searching for whether it is possible to reinstall old versions of apps in iTunes.

So glad I’m not alone in loving the NPR News app (text edition). It was a lesson for me - don’t just blindly trust the ‘update all‘ option in my iPad Air to bring in all the latest and greatest app versions. When I discovered my iPhone no longer had the trusty NPR News app because it was replaced by the newer NPR version, I was quick to save the old app in my iPad Air by skipping the app update always. Hoping to safeguard that app, I couldn’t bring myself to buying a newer iPad Pro that might auto update every app to the latest version. Well here’s good news: I finally bought the iPad Pro last week and at set up time, chose to install apps from the iPad Air backup. Viola! My beloved NPR News app was transferred over as is. Now I’m a happy camper and don’t no body messes with taking away the support of that app!

best features all gone !!!. As many others say in their negative reviews, one star is too high a rating for this new version but it’s impossible to write a zero-star review. All the features I used in the old app have been eliminated. I have a Primary Station, yes, but I browse to other stations on a regular basis for shows ‘my’ station doesn’t carry. The process of switching to another station is cumbersome and results in the former ‘Primary Station’ being replaced, so it has to be painstakingly re-selected when one wants to return it. Additionally, the previous version listed all the streams of any selected station, making it simple to select HD1, HD2, etc. The new version makes it nearly as cumbersome to select a stream as it is to choose the Primary Station in the first place. Needless to say, I have deleted the new NPR One app - it’s replaced by individual apps for the stations I listen to. Fortunately by now most individual stations have fine apps of their own. Not as convenient as the previous NPR One version, but a great improvement over the new version.

Absolutely AWFUL redo that completely ruined WAS an amazing app. On what planet is the new NPR app considered an improvement???? This new app breaks my heart and only leads me to curse the change. Early and often. And then look for great audio content elsewhere. NPR went from being my favorite app that I loved and used multiple times a day to being one that feels like a useless annoying waste of space on my phone. You took away pretty much everything I loved about the NPR app - the playlist function, the easy search function, being able to search by show and find and select individual stories. Now I have to wade through a bunch of annoyingly messy “headlines” and try to figure out which stories actually have audio and hope they are things I actually want to listen to?? I can’t just go to my favorite shows and scroll through. It’s also awkward to try to share things. Everything about this new app absolutely stinks. Who were the idiots who actually thought this was a good idea?

Already miss the Old App. I should have known better than to go with the new NPR app that replaced NPR News. There was so much to love about it. Although I do Support my local NPR Station, I also like to browse, including locally produced programs from other parts of the country, which are not carried by my local station. That was easy to do in the old app. I simply brought up the station, and chose an on-demand program. These shows were displayed alongside the live streams. In addition , I could create a Favorites list, and even add items to a playlist for later use. In the new version, all of these features are gone. Now, the only way to get on-demand material from other stations seems to involve changing one’s favorite station; and, even if you do that, you then have to go to a separate On-Demand tab to get such material, and there are fewer choices of podcasts and topics. For instance, on the old app, I could go to WUNC (not my local station), and listen to podcasts from The People’s Pharmacy. Now, even by making that station my favorite, I found very few choices—and The People’s Pharmacy wasn’t one of them. Then, I had to reset my favorite station; then, to get back to where I was (if it wasn’t my local station), I had to go to Recently Streamed, and _hope to find it there. I hope I will grow to like the new app better, but don’t count on it. The reason I even gave it 4 stars is that I’m a huge fan of NPR.

Good at what it does, horrible for the features it left out.. The new app has a better media player, with great pause and fast forward and rewind features and overall is more stable and reliable. That’s the good news. The bad news- they totally did away with the playlist, making it absolutely impossible to save individual episodes and play them whenever you want to. You’re now limited to selecting the current days version of each program, if you don’t listen to the entire program before the next days program comes out, you’re totally screwed, there’s no way to go back and listen to The previous one. Also every time you exit the app and come back it completely forgets where you were in the list of episodes for the days program, you have to basically start all over and manually skip ahead. A lot of wasted of time skipping things I’ve already heard just to get back where I left off listening. It’s basically killed the enjoyment of the app for me and made it nothing but frustrating. I know you guys are trying to force people to listen to the local stations more in order to support them but this is ridiculous. I don’t know who sat down and designed this thing but it seems to have deliberately omitted the very best features of the previous app.

Simply dreadful redesign. I spend time selecting segments for my playlists and putting them in a particular order. I can’t move segments around with this redesign, the app ignores the order and just skips around playing random segments, which means that all my favorite segments and episodes that I had saved in a part of the list that I seldom play back just disappeared while I was sleeping—several years’ worth of favorites that I’ll never retrieve, because the “just played” list is not part of this redesign. Everything is slower and clunkier—my playlist takes extra seconds to load, screen by screen as I scroll down, played segments don’t disappear right away after they’re played, you need to reload the page and then they’ll disappear, or maybe not, maybe you’ll have to delete segments you’ve listened to one by one, waiting for the page to reload in between each deletion and then scrolling down to get back to your place—none of which I had to do in the old app! Finally, the app is less intuitive and more confusing to navigate than it used to. Oh, and On Point is gone. I wish I could just go back to the old app; it wasn’t perfect, but it was much, much better than this.

New update is terrible. I know people sometimes have trouble with change, but this isn’t one of those things. The new update is really slow, will stop playing often, does not seem to have any programming from more than a few days ago, and very important for me… they took away the ability to make playlists. I take public transport a lot, and having a playlist made helps. Also I love to fall asleep listening to this app, but now I can’t listen to anything other than just one show or one program. Yes it may look better than the old app, but it’s functionality is way worse. I’m really disappointed that NPR did this. This app used to be part of my day, but now I’m starting to use it less and less. And honestly...maybe there is a little bit of conspiracy theory here, but maybe they made this app worse to get people to use the NPR one app which is also bad, but not as bad as this is. NPR, please please please change this back, or improve the functionality, and for the love of God please add the ability to have playlist! Or just delete this in force everybody to use the NPR one app.

You’ve got work to do, but it’s still the better app.. I’ve been using the NPR App for years. I listen to morning edition during the week, I listen to weekend edition at least one day if not both days on the weekend, and use it to listen to other articles on occasion as they peak my interest. It has been a great way to get my news with less of the crap that I see on the news stations. It is far from a perfect app, but it seems that someone is intentionally making it worse and trying to drive listeners to the NPR One app which I have no desire to use because you cannot set a playlist or even simply find Morning Edition in order to listen to the whole thing.I’ve never had an NPR station. I have always listen through the apps and now it’s becoming harder to do so.

Apparent bug in latest release and request for downloads like a podcast. I’m a big fan of npr and have enjoyed this app. Coinciding with the latest release, however, the app stopped playing all on demand stories in the playlist sequentially, and had to be advanced manually to the next story in the que, despite my selecting the “listen to all stories option.” The “play all stories option” continues to not work and after the end of one story must be advanced manually. This is particular annoying, and a departure from the previous editions. I have deleted the app twice and reinstalled but the app continues to stop after each story. Double clicking my headphones does not advance to the next story either. Therefore, when exercising, driving or other activities having to advance the story manually is a pain. Please fix. My other request would be the ability to download the stories, just like a podcast, so that they could be played when outside of good or no cellular reception.

This app is better than NPR One. . .. And I liked it best until I found weekend edition throttled to 4 stories this morning. My phone is loaded with apps, some of which I use, and I’ve never rated an app before in my life, but this was like a final straw. I’ve used NPR One and thoroughly disliked it before returning to this app. I’ve suffered through the various iterations of this app designed to make everyone switch away from it to NPR One. And now this. If I could get my favorite programs - especially morning and weekend edition - as podcasts that I could hear from my podcast app, I’d happily ditch both of these. I already listen to several other NPR programs that way. These apps are both getting in the way of me enjoying NPR, which I really like on the radio and contribute to financially through my local stations in South Carolina. Change developers or something, or else spend any money going toward app development on something that will meet the standards that NPR usually sets. I’d be very willing to pay for an app that lets me download and listen to playlist content from NPR. Or just make everything available as podcasts and be done with this app stuff. It is not bringing this listener closer to NPR.

Just the news. I liked the old app before the redesign better. Why do I have to dig through all the podcasts to find Morning Edition which is a flagship program? And why do the stories sometime end and I’m automatically listening to an hour long podcast on some other random topic? There are less top stories available to read than before, which is a way a definitely use the app, not just to listen. I may be in the minority on this, but I don’t like how the app knows what I’m interested in and tries to feed me more of that type story. One of the things I appreciate about NPR is that it isn’t an echo chamber like so many other platforms. I really just want to listen to the news of the day. But, all things considered (no pun intended!), I love this app and get more news here than any other source.

Bring the NPR News app back, please. The new NPR app seems designed like the NPR One app, which is really unfortunate. On the old NPR News app, I could create my own playlists, listening to these three stories but not that one. That functionality has all been removed from the new (and certainly not improved) NPR app. Sometimes I might want to listen to most of one day’s All Things Considered program, but would (for example) delete the sports stories because I just don’t care about them. With the change to this new NPR app, it’s not possible to curate my own NPR playlist. It’s frustrating that NPR’s “digital” department thinks that this is what their listeners want. The new NPR app is much less listener-friendly and makes it more difficult to seek out new/interesting content. It is still easy to find Morning Edition or All Things Considered—but it is very difficult to find the off-the-wall and obscure programs produced by smaller NPR member stations across the country. The old NPR News app was great for that. Ugh. I gave up on using NPR One years ago because I didn’t like how that program “decided” for me what it thought I would want to listen to. I was an active user of the NPR News app for years and years. I used the Playlist feature on a daily basis. It was a very frustrating morning to be forced into using this new NPR app that has taken away much of the functionality of the old NPR News app. Please bring the old NPR News app back!

Eviscerated NPR app. Other reviewers have gone into detail on all the useful features that have been removed from this app, so I won’t repeat the entire list. I miss a lot of the old features, but in particular the loss of the playlist has made the new version all but unusable. If I stop listening for awhile the app refreshes and I have to fast forward through every story I’ve already listened to to get back to the one I was on. From the embedded NPR One promos it seems like the purpose of this now sadly limited app is to drive users to NPR One. If I wanted to use NPR One I already would! I can’t stand NPR One, partly because its filter bubbling algorithm has gotten my interests totally wrong and there’s no way to reset it, but mostly because I can’t listen to the important news I want to hear all the way through before it veers off into unimportant, and even outdated, stories. The older NPR News app gave me what I want, which is now gone with this new app. So much for “improvements”.

Add a Favorite Button!. I saw today’s article written about a black hole (Scientists Find Nearest-Known Black Hole, In Distressingly Fitting Metaphor by Colin Dwyer) and amidst the coronavirus panic and well really the entire fabric of reality breaking down, I found this article’s wry humor to be hilarious and I instinctively looked for that little transparent star that would allow me to save this magnificent little article so that one day in the indefinite future when we don’t have to worry about whatever in the world the next 2020 apocalyptic scenario is going to be (as you can see, I have already accepted that 2020 is going to continue to go downhill-now it's just a matter of "what" as opposed to "if"!), I can look back at this little article and laugh, reminiscing about how chaotic the supposed end times were. HOWEVER! My poor right thumb was left hovering and bewildered as its desired destination, that transparent five-pointed star, remained elusive even after a distressing scroll down and up the page. Please save the last shreds of my sanity and add the ability to favorite and save articles for later! It's the final bastion of normalcy left in this forsaken world!

Gone from buggy to unusable. If you have an iPhone I would recommend you not even bother trying to use this (cr)app. I’ve been using this app for several years to listen to local and national public radio stations, as well as read quick headlines. It has always been fairly buggy, dropping streams or just not connecting. It had seemed to be improving until this last week or so, and I appreciated the stability. It is has become my primary way to consume NPR and local radio station content. Now it is so broken it is not worth using, and I’m wondering if I really need to continue contributing to NPR as a supporter, if they are going to waste funds on worthless apps. Now my closest local station, OPB, never works. When I play it, I get the (annoying) bumper ad but then nothing—just “dead air”. My next most local station, KUOW, does work, but drops every few minutes, usually for a few seconds and then repeating the (ever annoying) bumper ad—leading me to think the connection was broken and reconnected. It often just stops for no reason. I can click the Play button on my iPhone’s lock screen or my Apple Watch, which usually does nothing, then I have to unlock phone, go to the app and press play or try restarting app. These issues occur all the time now, and with multiple locations—different Wi-Fi networks and using cellular data. So it is not just my network.

Buggy and inconvenient design. First of all - every time I leave a review for this app I get a “message from developer” which I can never read and then my review and rating disappear. Anyways, trying again again. I’m a sustaining member of my local station and listen almost exclusively via this app. All i want to do is get up and listen to Morning Edition while I cook breakfast. App is incredibly slow to load, requires significant navigation even though I do the exact same thing every day (especially w weekend edition! Just give us a shortcut or a way to subscribe!), and because I don’t get wifi in my kitchen, i have to leave the phone in another room and play via Bluetooth speaker. So then when the app starts arbitrarily playing a segment in the middle or stops playing for no reason have to leave the room to go press play again or start the segment from the beginning. Please, JUST RELEASE MORNING EDITION AND ATC AS PODCASTS!!! Omg i just cannot express how frustrating it is to use this app!! I just want morning edition to download automatically like a podcast and then play straight through!! How hard is this!??! Please just quit it with the stupid middle management politics or whatever reason you have for not either improving this app or releasing as a podcast and provide a useable and convenient way to listen to the news for those of us who would like to listen to shows on our own schedule. This app does a disservice to NPR

Did music die?. As other reviews of this redesign have outlined, the redesign of this app has made for a frustrating user experience, and gotten rid of some fundamental features or reorganized them in such a way as to make it not worth the effort. In addition to the confusing navigation (I have to reallly look for the news briefs every time), it looks like music-driven NPR affiliate stations and NPR-produced shows have been excluded. I used the old NPR app to hop between different affiliates in my area (NYC) and also elsewhere on a regular basis, for a mix of news and music. Stations like WQXR and WBGO seem to have been taken out of local search and I can’t even find national shows like All Songs Considered or Tiny Desk Concert. What’s the point of having a unified app if it’s not incorporating all NPR programming. Will you be releasing a separate music app? During a time when drastic news events are contributing to a mass mental health crisis, it’s downright cruel to NOT make music shows and stations readily available alongside headlines and news shows, when it’s a way many of us try to deal with the insanity.

Awful, bad update. Give us back the old version. Please, please bring back the previous iOS app—it’s SO far superior to the updated version!! The previous version was great; easy to use and useful. A news app doesn’t need a fancy interface, it needs to quickly let users find content. But you’ve traded function for form in the new update, and it’s awful. I’ve used the app (and listened for hours per day, literally) since it launched in 2009, and I couldn’t be more disappointed. I have both an iPhone and a Samsung for work, and now I have to use my work phone to listen because it still has the old version. The previous app made it easy to scroll through stories, but this one has flashy headlines and more pictures substituted for the content users want. All the stories I’d loaded in my playlist to listen on the way to work vanished overnight, and I can’t even create a playlist!! The FOUR favorite stations id saved and listened to frequently are gone and it’s cumbersome to find a live stream. It’s also irritating and cumbersome to find favorite programs. You guys have broken something that didn’t need fixing. Please, please ditch this version and give your loyal users back the previous, actually useful one.

NPR One in a trenchcoat. The old app was never the best, but this new version- basically a thinly disguised NPR One- is terrible and a huge step backward. Like NPR One it emphasizes podcasts and other garbage at the expense of live, local radio stations and newscasts- arguably what most NPR listeners actually want. I used to be able to open the app and immediately start listening to my local station (or other national stations if I wanted) and now it takes multiple steps to do so. I have podcast apps already, and if I want to listen to podcasts I know where to get them. Don’t force NPR One on me. Stability-wise this app is definitely worse as well- it takes forever to connect to AirPlay with multiple starts and stops and random disconnects. After the third disconnect in 10 minutes this morning I just opened my local station’s app and used that instead… it’s ugly but uncomplicated and the stream just works. Listen to your users- this really, REALLY isn’t just whiners who don’t like change. This redesign really is a huge regression. Keep NPR One it’s own, separate app and stop forcing it on the rest of us.

Trash. Did nobody usability test?. The app is so crudely designed. The iPad app is superior, which makes no sense. Want to browse by topic? You can… sort of. Good luck finding that section. Then, once inside it’s a mix of audio and text articles. Okay, but I’m driving, and I want to LISTEN, no filters exist. Okay, add a few stories to you playlist. Good luck finding your playlist. It’s there. But it’s hidden. Want to see what is playing now? Sure, you can, but you can’t see what will play next unless you go to your playlist, which takes like 5 taps, and then you can see it, but now you’ve lost your place, browsing for content. Why is there not a bottom, persistent icon for now playing, which also has the playlist? Okay fine, so you’re listening to your playlist… you add more content while listing. And it doesn’t play. It goes on to some random “live” content you didn’t ask for. What the? Somehow there are more audio advertisements (mostly for NPR, which uhhh why?) than on air. It’s like this app was designed by someone who has never used an app before… or like some clueless person at NPR wrote a wishlist of “app should play content, show text, have playlists” and handed that list to a developer in India. The developer finished the app and that was that. No one tested it or cared. Look at the App Store ratings. How is this not. 5 star app? Listen to the reviews. Scrap this junk and start over.

Useless to me without playlist feature. I used the NPR News app every day for years. I queued all the content I cared about when I had time to do so, and then I could return to the app at any point to listen to all those selections I made. It was nearly perfect—the playlist feature in the previous NPR News app was a bit buggy. In the new NPR app, there is no way for me to queue any content, and there is no way to automate playing of content I want to hear. I now simply have to be content with whichever ‘stream’ I’m listening to or be willing to put in a lot of conscious effort to constantly choose the content I want to listen to. I don’t—I switched to an app called News Now, which also does not have the features I want. It does let me stream the day’s national news content without much effort, and that makes it better for me than the new NPR app. Implement a playlist feature in this app. I want to be able to choose any NPR content, especially nationally relevant news segments, to keep in a queue that I can store, return to and choose content from at any time. Until the NPR app has a playlist feature that allows me to do these things, it is useless to me.

NPR content is awesome, app make it inaccessible. The previous app had significant usability issues, no doubt, but it was nonetheless a viable conduit for all the amazing and important content NPR delivers. This update to the app breaks that access, in many ways. I am a UX professional, so here’s an example to support my statement: Listening to hourly local and national news updates (core functionality of the app) used to be a 2 click task; now local news access is nearly impossible and national news access is hidden at least 7 clicks in (and out). There are many other such use case issues. NPR used to make me feel like I was an informed citizen partner, seeking insight - I miss that. The release (required update) of this app (the design philosophy behind the redesign) makes me feel like NPR now thinks of me like I’m another customer, while at the same time ruined ease of access to basic content. This frustrates me to no end; it breaks my heart. Unfettered access to reliable information is becoming more and ever more important in our current circumstances; please fix this app and restore that connection. Sincerely.

I miss the old NPR. The old app was better, and I see no improvements in this one. I wish there were easier ways to see articles in the basic heading (US news, intl news, arts, music,…), then look at listings. There is too much use of pictures and not enough use of text. I hate search, and I want to be able to look through articles. In general, I wish I could have a text-only option. I dislike the space and waste of pictures. And then there is the inexplicable decline in content. Covid seems to have killed the brain cells of all NPR employees. I had to stop listening then. I only go for the few remaining islands of sanity, like Science Friday. The bias in subject choice and tone has become sad, unintellectual propaganda. Overall, NPR is embarrassingly bad now. I am not a conservative. I am a registered Democrat. It is too krazy-leftist for me. Some stories sound like Saturday Night Live skits, or right-wing memes. It hurts because I was more invested in NPR than I realized. I hope someone sane can right the ship. If they are too blind to that, they should probably seek out openly conservative hires for a few years just to something, anything that does not sound like it is coming from a 1960’s hippy commune.

Terrible update, delete app now. The best feature of the old NPR News app was the ability of the listener to create a personal playlist from a menu of stories from various NPR programs. They’ve taken that functionality away. This app is essentially useless to me now, and I’m deleting it. EDIT: eight weeks later, and NPR is making qualified statements about they will “work on building a better queued listening experience for NPR in the months ahead.” Except NPR ALREADY HAD THAT SOLUTION and dumped it, presumably to force listeners to NPR One and local stations. As a result, my NPR listening has declined by 95%, and I did NOT renew my longstanding membership with my local affiliate. Bring back the playlist! EDIT (JUNE 10): I see the developer responded to my earlier review. Refusing to renew my NPR membership is entirely in line with my objection to the removal of the playlist. Local affiliate fundraising provides stations with funds to pay for programming from national NPR, and moreover, one result of the removal of the playlist was to force listeners to the local stations instead of self-curating NPR content through the app. I recognize the importance of local stations, but local stations need to use their leverage to support listeners’ range of options, not reduce them. Until the playlist is restored, we should not contribute to NPR through its member stations.

Update ruined a great app. It’s true, the NPR news app had it’s probs - you cld only play individual stories, but you cldnt play an entire show. Well, they changed that. But, they also took away the “play” bar, which allowed you to go back over something you might not have heard, or skip over something u don’t care about. Now if u miss something u hve to re-listen to the entire story - or the entire show if you had made that choice (either that or re-listen to the story, but then yr back to listening to individual stories). Basically it takes away some of the flexibility that makes podcasts easier than the radio show - On Demand is nice, admittedly, but considering I’m listening on my phone the ability to go back over stuff i missed was important to me. It used to be a lot more User Friendly too. There also used to be a great many more podcasts available. Now, instead of an easy to read list of dozens & dozens of podcasts, there’s abt a dozen icons instead - idk the logos for NPR shows, so icons take up space while not helping much. There isn’t a Search function neither. I got sold on the update bc of the ability to play the entire show, now I regret it. I might as well just get the NPR 1 app that has all their podcasts.

Updated review: better. So I’m leaving my previous review at the bottom so people know what I’m talking about. I received a developer response asking me to provide them some more info, and I just kept forgetting to respond to it so I never actually gave them additional feedback. But the primary station and crashing issues I gripes about below seem to have been resolved. It’s still not the most intuitive interface, but now I like it better than the old app. It’s been working pretty reliably well for the past week or so. Not my fave app, but solid for my use (which is just listening to my local station in the AM while I get ready for work). Newest version is crazy buggy. I’ve had to search for and set my primary station pretty much daily. Sometimes the search function decides not to work and I need to close and reopen the app. Sometimes the whole deal just freezes and I need to close and reopen the app. Pausing causes it to crash. Dropping the signal causes it to crash. Navigating through the app causes it to crash. Fix them bugs!!

Hot mess but slowly improving. This app is unfortunately a hot mess. I’m a two decade NPR listener. I appreciate going through the daily news stories and building a playlist to listen to throughout the day. Unbelievably they merged the old NPR app which did this fairly well with the NPR One app which is a complete mess of shows, podcasts and ads, without key features like being able to manually sort the playlist. Thankfully that feature has now returned and slow improvements are being made (however if you listen to NPR podcasts I would highly recommend you do it in a dedicated podcast app rather than here). Suggestions for future updates: 1) a Playlist button in the interface, not hidden 3-4 clicks away. There’s plenty of space at the bottom for one extra button and it’s very annoying to have to click multiple times just to get to it 2) the ability to turn off the annoying ticker at the bottom which shows what you watched previously. Just an X at the end would suffice. It is very annoying. 3) The ability to pin the shows that I like at the top of the Podcasts page instead of having them constantly change because you think you know what I want at different times of the day (which you don’t!) 4)Why do I get audio ads in my playlist? I’m a member of NPR/ PBS

Ok, could be better. I use this app daily and often multiple times per day. It does the basics pretty well, but I wish it was smoother and a bit more flexible. I echo some of the suggestions I’ve seen posted. My main irritations are also about difficulty in sharing; the developer has responded about an option on the story page; I just know that from the item I’m listening to at the moment, there is no sharing option. For items that I really wanted to share, I have to find it on NPR’s website and send that way — something I don’t take the time to do as often as I think to share something. Also, the Listen To All Stories function seems to cue for an ad/promo to be inserted in the story sequence, which is fine, but it interrupts the flow by either skipping the story that should play right after the ad, or just stopping together after the ad. I select Listen To All Stories when I don’t want to have to hover over my phone, so it’s annoying when I’m across the room or otherwise occupied and then have to go back to it (or just have silence) because once again the play has stopped or skipped. Fine to play the ad, not fine for it to derail the basic play-all function.

Playlist gone, app now useless. I’ve gone from using this app every day to not at all after the playlist function was removed. My consumption of NPR content has therefore gone from about 40 min per day to zero. Since I don’t listen anymore, I don’t donate anymore. I check the app occasionally in the hope that developers add back the playlist feature, but the latest release seems to have completely broken the app. The “home” screen is a blank list with the loading icon frozen at the top, the “topics” tab has sections like Most Popular but no content within those sections, and so on. It’s as if the developers disconnected the app from all NPR resources. If the playlist feature was losing money for NPR, I would have appreciated an honest statement from NPR about it, and a chance to pay extra for the feature. Instead this app appears to have been nuked in favor of NPR One, which forces users to listen to a frustrating combination of local streams and very limited curated content, all the while preventing access to what people actually want to listen to: morning edition and all things considered.

A couple specific fixable bugs. I enjoy this app and use it daily; the playlist has some issues, the biggest of which is pretty clear: the handoff from one story to another. If you are listening to a story that is, say, 3:15 long, and the next item is, say 6:20 long, when the app begins the next selection, it does not reset the “bookmark” (the point at which you are in the selection to which you are listening) so you begin listening to the new track at 3:15 in. It’s a nuisance to have to manually go back to the beginning of the track. Seems like a very easy fix. Also, adding a new selection to the playlist while you are listening to the playlist always creates a clear audible glitch, which varies from a brief pause, to playing a disorienting random snippet from one of the tracks for up to a couple of seconds. Also, the app fails to properly interact with iOS: the Lock Screen interface is unpredictable (sometimes works sometimes not) and lacks the 15- and 30-second-skip features. Still a useful app; needs some fixes. When addressed I would change to 5 stars.

Very responsive to feedback.. I enjoy this app for being able to select the stories that interest me. I use it most on CarPlay during my commute to and from work. I felt that the CarPlay experience could use some improvement, so I gave some ideas of what I would find helpful, and some suggestions of how to implement those ideas. To my absolute delight, the latest update included a fantastic increase in CarPlay features and functionality. I understand it is egocentric of me to think that my suggestions are what lead to the improvements of the CarPlay experience. But given the otherwise highly coincidental timing, I prefer to think of this instance as an example that the developers genuinely take the feedback section of this app seriously. Even if there was another news radio app with fewer flaws and more features, I would still rate this one higher because of the development team’s demonstrated attention to honest feedback.

Perpetually glitchy.. For three years now, this app constantly plays the next segment at some random spot in the next segment. If you want to listen to All Things Considered or Morning Edition hands-free, it is absolutely impossible. You periodically have to grab your phone, unlock, open the app, launch the player, and then scroll the finicky slider back to the beginning when the next segment inevitably starts at some random point. Often this random start is very close to the end of the next segment and you only have seconds before it is lost to the “already played” list. Love NPR! This app is beyond frustrating; especially while driving, doing the dishes, painting, showering, climbing a ladder, gardening, riding a bike, sweeping the floor… living life, etc. I have actually cracked my phone because I had to pull it out of my pocket to launch the transport slider to swipe a segment to the start. I have nearly avoided a few major driving accidents because I am constantly being forced to reach into my pocket to pull out my phone to correct the random random start of the next segment. It’s a weird and frustrating bug, and it’s been around for three years! I’m not the only one reporting this bug.

They’ve ruined it. The NPR app used to be really good. Not perfect, but good. This major overhaul has destroyed what it once was, and it’s so disappointing. It used to be an easy routine — every morning I’d wake up and before setting out on my drive, I’d quickly and easily be able to select the Morning Edition stories that sounded interesting and I’d be on my way. Now it requires thorough navigation and way more clicks. Nothing is intuitive anymore. The addition of the “interesting” button is useless — why would I click that? I just want to select my stories and be on my way. In addition, and perhaps the worst of it, is that it no longer remembers how much of a story I have listened to. I can’t tell you how many times now I get 6 minutes in on a 7 minute story, then have to stop it… so when I try to pick up on the story again, I have to start it all over. If I’m driving (which I am doing 95% of the time I am using the app), I can’t safely and easily scrub to find where I left off. So irritating! Also, if I listen to my stories and they end, let it just stop — don’t just auto-play what you think I want to hear! In all, this new revision might just get me to have to find a new source for my daily news. Sad.

Redesign looks nice, but missing fratures. The new NPR app is prettier than the old app, but it is less usable: # No search. I hope this is added back soon, but the new app simply does not have any search functionality. I can't see why search is omitted. In particular, this makes it impossible to listen to segments that are no longer currently listed in the latest installment of a program. For instance, I often like to losten to "It's all politics" segments from Friday's All Things Considered. And this is now impossible, unless I listen on the day it airs. # More menus/more navigation. For me, and (I suspect) many other listeners, the most inportant page is the list of all programs. This is where I always start. It is now tucked away in a submenu under "On Demand". It's just a bit of additional scrolling + an additional tap, but I find myself doing this over and over again. # Lower information density -> more scrolling. Once within a list of stories/segmants, only 3 list items fit on the screen at once (on my iPhone X). This makes it harder to look over a list and choose which items you want to listen to. This change allowed for small excerpts to be displayed underneath segment titles, but these excerpts are often truncated first sentences which, in practice, don't actually help summarize what a segment is about. - Taken together, I can no longer use this app to listen to NPR in the way I want to listen to it: picking individual segments to add to my playlist.

Potential to be great. I think the NPR app could be great! I had an npr app that was orange a few years ago. It would show the station’s itinerary for the day with the times. I found that SO helpful! This new one doesn’t even show the name of what it is playing - only the station name. I moved to the PNW a few years ago, and I greatly dislike the npr stations up here. I like to listen to the ones back home - KGOU and KERA. But, I never know which show is playing until I start listening - the time change always throws me off. Is there a way to have a listing of what’s coming - like on a tv guide kind of thing (Like where it highlights where it is or moves the bar so you can see what is playing at that exact time)? I would think NPR would have the resources to make this a great app. Could you please put a team on it to make it more user-friendly like many other “entertainment” type apps. Thank you!!

New update removes functionality – doesn’t at it!. Like so many others here, I am so frustrated that the playlist function is gone. I would have to agree with many of the other reviews that the functionality has been diminished in lieu of a fancier appearance. Now if I want to listen to yesterday‘s show, I would have to download it from the Internet, and listen to story by story, as opposed to being able to select what I wanted to listen to and add it to the playlist. There’s no easy way to get to my favorite programs like Fresh Air, so that we can pick and choose which programs we want to hear. Normally, the updates here are great – but this is one of the worst ones I’ve seen and for what? A fancier app? They advertise that they added to the functionality – but they removed the functionality! Please restore the functionality that you have taken away! I know my voice is just joining the chorus at this point, but hopefully you will pay attention to the sheer volume of comments here – all asking for the same thing.

Roll back please!. Once again NPR has successfully “improved” upon an excellent app by creating an inferior one. The drastic new interface changes are innovative for the sake of being innovative, and only serve to limit or confound the experience of the user. By eliminating the “now playing” queue, NPR has also limited users’ ability interrupt play for other smartphone functions: there is no longer an ability to take a phone call and then return to where you left off. The app reloads to the start page with no bookmark to what program you were listening or how far into it you were. Also problematic is how the app determines your local station - though I have manually selected my local station, I am frequently diverted to another one that is 1000 miles away. All of this would be bearable, at least, if with this new rollout NPR didn’t also take the opportunity to eliminate options it had previously offered. Don’t waste time looking for reruns of Car Talk! It is no longer available here.

Love npr but hating the app. Improve news is great but I cannot listen to the live broadcast because of work so I love loading pieces of news that most interest me and listening to them as I get a chance. This is where the app totally fails. When I look at all things considered our morning edition it consistently odd leaving out news pieces. Like this morning, there where only all the 4 news pieces in the morning edition feed. Why aren’t news pieces loading? In the npr one app all the news pieces are there. But in that app you can’t stream the pieces you want to listen to later in sequence. What should really happen is the apps teams for this app and npr one should take the best features of each app and make one single app. Why have two? Update. There must be some glitch in the app. This bug makes stories not appear. After going back into the app and moving around to different programs all the morning edition stories finally appeared. This isn’t always the case though. Wish they would figure this out.

Revert back to the old app. I rarely take time to write app reviews (this might be the first). The new NPR News app is so functionally deficient however that I couldn’t keep quiet. The old app allowed me to read articles even when offline or with low signal, which was critical for my morning subway commute. I also kept a list of favorite stations that I’ve learned to love all around the country in different places I’ve lived. I’ve even been able to easily tune in to these same stations while living in other countries. The old app was incredibly more functional and useful if not as beautiful as the new app, which considering that none of the articles and photos load while I’m underground in the morning anyway, doesn’t really mean much. UPDATE: It gets worse the more I use it — there’s no search function! NPR, I’m trying to share your news and I can’t just easily go into the app and do that?! How does that make sense — earned marketing is the gold standard of what you want your listeners to do for you!

Nearly useless without NPR Programs & playlist. I'm crushed. I've been a heavy user of the NPR app for a long time. As an expat living six time zones away, it's a vital way for me to stay connected to the news from home. Recently the ability to access Featured NPR News programs and to choose segments from those programs to listen to has vanished. The app's only remaining utility for me is listening to the headline news. I was disappointed when you killed the playlist feature, but this is the final blow. NPR One is equally useless because it doesn't allow me to select and curate what I want to listen to. For the large number of devoted NPR listeners living overseas, being able to listen live to a particular station may not be of interest because of time differences and the fact that local news is less relevant. The latest app changes have significantly diminished my ability to access NPR News. Please please please bring back the ability to access ATC, Morning Edition, and other non-podcast news programs, and maybe even the playlist. How about it?

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Three touches to streaming news.... Works flawlessly and as advertised. Hourly news plus It's All Politics and Wait, Wait plus all the other NPR newscasts. Get it.

Useful. Excellent & user friendly

Still some crashing. You can't beat the content, so naturally I would wish for more audio files to be made available online. The app does crash or simply cut out mid-stream now and again. Once I launched an audio story that must have been corrupted -- there was only a deafening screech! On the whole though it is my main source of news. Keeps me sane on my commute!

Thanks. Thanks for the great app NPR.

Where has its mojo gone?. This app no longer wants to know the latest news — on any topic!! Please help me get my daily fix of US news again!

Fixed. Faulty update now fixed and I'm so happy my favourite NPR is back on the air on my phone. I was lost without. Thanks. Have a nice day to you all.

Listener. The best!

Great app. The way news apps should be.

Please add playlist downloading or larger buffering. Thanks for the return of the playlist! Please improve how the app deals with restarting after losing the internet connection. I almost always have to close and restart the app after losing the connection. Also, it would be great to have the option of downloading the entire playlist to the buffer. My internet connection is very spotty on my commute, and I miss NPR for a good portion of my train ride. Thanks!

Very good app. I use this to listen to live stream radio. Very easy to use and has a lot of contents available.

Love it!. Up to the minute research!

Love NPR. I love NPR - puts most Australian media to shame

Peefer. Just like there radio NPR stand out as leaders in hard working news gatherers.

So important!. With the App Store providing 99.9% ridiculous useless annoying rubbish it's so great to get high quality news on a clean user friendly app. Thanks so much to all who make this happen.

Australian NPR fan. Best app. Ever.

NPR app. Great news app , does what it does soo well

Stick with the iPad format. An....OK app, I guess. But as with NPR one, a downgrade from the very old good iPad app, NPR News. Here, print articles are jumbled with audio, so one has to scroll through them ALL to just make a playlist😩 I will always support NPR, but their app designers are far more interested in bad “new” technology to predict what you want and pushing that at you than focusing on the quality of a good thing they had.

Almost pretty good. When you want to listen to the playlist, it plays one item and then stops. You have to go back and open the app and then the next item will play. A little frustrating in an otherwise great app for NPR. Would also appreciate being able to listen to the 24 hour cast that is available on the website.

Great app. NPR maintains its high quality through this app also, in addition to conveying the news.

It's great!. Exactly what I wanted. Access to hundreds of different radio stations. Great listens, and open ideas and opinions.

Drop Outs Annoying. NPR is a great station and you know this because you're thinking of downloading the app. One problem though... I'm running 3G on my iPhone and the programs keep dropping out. I'm listening for a minute or so and then they stop and there's no way to pick up where they drop out. You have to restart from the beginning and find where you for up to. Really annoying!!

Good stuff. Thanks for your extensive news reporting and docos. Glad to have the app!

I can't get by without my MUM. This the place for news and for excellent articles of life's interest.

NPR no longer appears to function correctly on my iPad Pro. Even after removing app and after that deleting and reinstalling the NPR App, it seems to not function correctly. The App either freezes or show “oops” errors. Regrettably, I have removed it permanently. I didn’t use it as much as other news Apps but I did enjoy it when I did. Tis a shame.

Great content, just want to download. Great content and easy to use app, I just wish I could download the segments for offline use. I have a few of the podcasts but still the shorter audio clips would be handy for when commuting and out of range

Great Leap Backwards. This app is so slow and clunky, you're better off getting one of the non official NPR apps. Don't get me wrong, not including silly games, this was my most used App, BUT it's now as slow as molasses. Response time for any action on the app takes 10 to 15 seconds, and seeing as just listening to an article requires at least three actions, this quickly becomes very inconvenient. The previous in-dig-nation (little pun there) had its flaws, but was more user friendly. PLEASE FIX OR RESTORE PREVIOUS.

Exceedingly well thought out news app. Excellent news summary but this is found in many news apps. NPR programs are available to play as a whole or by item. Items can be played individually or added to your own playlist for replay later. It's like assembling your own podcast...brilliant! Audio quality is excellent and the app seems quite stable.

Excellent app. One of my most used and enjoyed apps. Thank you

Go to for news. You remember that thing called reporting, not the make up a sensational headline MSM? Yep it's here simple and readable. Job done

Nice news app. Like the categories

Home sweet home. I love this app! It's a challenge to get real, thoughtful news nowadays and having this app allows me to connect with home with the many different programs avail. Gotta be in my top 3

Essential for Expats. Living overseas this app is invaluable to stay abreast of news, entertainment and trends back in the U.S. Despite a mildly liberal focus it's mostly fair and unbiased. A must-have.

Well balanced news. Feel more informed with a daily dose of NPR

Drops out. Since this updated I can't play any of th audio at all. When I want to start audio, the app crashes. Does this update need the latest Iphone operating system?

Great source of news. NPR is a great source of news and gives insights not readily available through other outlets

Lovely little way to keep up to date. I like listening to NPR, now I can read and listen while waiting for a coffee. The local papers where I live are pretty useless, so it's great to have this simple app on my phone. Cheers NPR!

Thank you. I'm in love with this app it has a wide range of stories and services available and very easy to use even in Australia your weekly political round-up is the best👍🏾

Frustrating Scroll lag. Scrolling through the list of articles can be frustratingly slow. The fraction of a second pause is fairly consistent. Please fix.

Intelligent and essential. A much loved app which keeps me up to date on the world in an intelligent and critical manner.

Perfect. This app is just the thing to listen, sort & save NPR radio broadcasts, very handy and well set out

Version crashes repeatedly. On my 4s running os 6.0.1 NPR crashes frequently. Runs for about 5 mins then crashes (happens on both all things considered and morning edition radio)...

Still the best. I can't live without this app. NPR is one of the best news sources in the world, and this app keeps you plugged in wherever you go. Works perfectly too. Love it!

Try it. I m downloading and want to have a try. I think it's a attractive function which allows me to keep the news and repeat to listen later on.

Best layout for news apps. Love this app - so well designed and great content to boot! Even a few hanging moments and having to reinstall couldn't get me to give it any less than 5 stars :)

No frills, comprehensive and responsive. Very good

Lot's of listening options!. The app would crash when I would be listening to stories in my playlist. I hope this has been fixed.

very good. Easy to use, well organized contents and user friendly interface. Highly recommend.

Hourly news update. I love the 5 minute radio news update, perfect way to get news on my walk to work.

Great App. Intuitive and easy to use.

Great way to stay up to date. This app helps me stay informed while living abroad. Love the podcasts and program playlists! Can sometimes get a bit glitchy - stories not loading all the way but I use this app so much I am able to look past minor interruptions!

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Bring back playlists. Older version of the app was superior. Really miss the playlist feature. Integrating google cast would be nice too

Good app. Does what it says.

local newscast often cut short. local newscast seems limited to 2:01 and is often cut off mid stream. pls extend cutoff

Great. Great. Delivers the news. Ez pz. Gg.

Quick and concise. This has become my go-to place for the latest news.

No Canadian Content. American News feeds only. Put in some Canadian news feeds and you get at least 4 stars.

V. An excellent app

For Alex Lindsay.... (of MacBreak Weekly) For removing the playlist capability and essentially downgrading the app. That said, Alex should really move to a better news source like No Agenda anyway.

Old NPR App was so much better!. This new version is slow, glitchy and hard to navigate. No access to older episodes. No ability to start episodes halfway through or pick and chose news bits from episodes. Bring back the old app or fix this one please!

Latest update a disaster. After loading the latest update, I can't open the app AT ALL! There was nothing wrong with the previous version. Please fix this soon--I miss my NPR!

Frequent crashes. Attempting to listen to some stories will instantly crash the app. There is no way of telling which stories will cause this behaviour and about one-quarter to one-third of stories will. Essentially, if you use this app, it will crash and it will crash often.

My Zen spot for US news. Living in Toronto, NPR apps keep me close to sources in the US, where important things just keep happening. Thanks NPR!

Well done. ....

Do not update, was good, terrible now. I used to use this app twice a day on the way to and from work. Now I am not so sure. The change from the legacy NPR News app to what we have now NPR is terrible. Key features such as playlist is lost, you can no longer increase the text size (say for reading in car) without affecting all apps. The text of the article can no longer be read by the screen reader, so if you are vision impaired or just want it read out to you while you are driving, you are out of luck. The home screen is a random (most popular) rather than predictable latest news. Popular by what? I see red bull ads there, is that popular? Or was that just paid. Terrible regression. Do not update. You have been warned.

Great Content But App is Flakey. Love the content & streams but the app often crashes.

Please give listeners control. This new app is bad enough that I could consider stopping my monthly donations after decades of support. I want to choose what I want to listen to and then it stops playing when it gets to the end. Please do not play content I didn’t ask for. Also, search and content cataloging are too hard to work with. It feels defeating at times. I find myself listening to NPR less.

No Canadian content. Looks good but missing Canadian links

Not happy. The old app was fine - clean and simple. This is a disorganized mess of features I don't want and don't use. Please restore the old one as an option.

Where have playlists gone ?. Why have you removed personalization with playlists ???

NPR is great!. NPR is not the CBC! It's the American counterpart and if you ask me, far superior. Any news junkie out there owes it to themselves to listen to NPR on a regular basis.

New version missing playlist. I love NPR, but one of the best things about the last app is that there was a playlist you could set up. This new one doesn’t have that feature, so you can’t set up a pile of articles to play through and listen without having to select something new every time. Add a playlist, and this would be a full star rating.

Terrible. Great programming, but awful app. The old version wasn’t great but it did work. The one is unusable.

Could be so much better. Really needs a playback speed selector. 1x isn't good for everyone.

Got rid of sound icons, why??. It used to be when you look through the home feed, stories that have audio would have a little sound icon next to it as opposed to written-only articles. This made it easy for me to go through the list and choose stories to add to a playlist I can listen to while doing chores. Now you have to tap on each individual article one by one and go into to it to find out whether or not it had audio. Why would they make it less user friendly??

Disappointed to lose the playlists. Why remove that option? Now I can’t select the collection of stories I want. Tough for cooking, working out, etc. I’m very disappointed.

Just use the podcast app. NPR used to be good reliable journalism, but has become a mouthpiece for govt propaganda. It is also very frustrating to hear ads asking for donations to “support their important work” just to regularly hear BBC content. This app is a waste of space.

Update your icon for dark mode. Great app but please update the icon for darkmode.

No mechanism for feedback. NPR appears to operate in a self satisfied vacuum, shielding itself from potential criticism (or accolades) by refusing all feedback. No comments or Readers Forum. Even “contact us to find what you’re looking for” and “feedback and help” return ‘page not found.’ Too bad; would’ve loved to share thoughts about 2018’s GREAT Reads, for example. Like how Harlequin Romance titles like The Wedding Date, Duke by Default or To Be Honest get included.

What’s Wrong with the App!. Starting a few days ago, my app stopped refreshing. I deleted it and re-downloaded it, and now it isn’t showing anything. What the heck, NPR?!

Best App of its kind. Perhaps surprisingly this app is as good as it gets. Provides the top headlines in a clear and user friendly way

Content is king; and interface is clean. The best content out there and a very clean interface. Great how you can read stories and have link to audio of it that is easily accessible. When add Sharing and ability to scrub audio in upcoming release will exceed 5 stars.

Broke what didn’t need to be fixed. The interface was simpler before. Now it’s kind of clunky and the add to playlist button doesn’t do anything.

Update is buggy. This was a great, user friendly app. Now I can’t stream the latest newscast. Also, when I listen live, it’ll suddenly stop streaming mid-story. What was broken that needed this fix?

Missing search. I love the new app redesign, but am struggling to find stories I previously read because the search function was removed. There also seems to be a maximum number of stories that can load from each category.

Simply amazing.. It's pretty difficult to listen to NPR in Canada unles you're sitting at the computer, so this app is wonderful for he sheer mobility and ease of use it provides.

Total failure. Current version does not load content.. Review title says it all. Content doesn’t display, all I get is a series of blank screens.

Nice app. Works

Playlist items don’t always start at beginning. Why is it that, after all these years, NPR still can’t make an ap that simply lets me listen to all stories from morning edition one after the other, in order, without stopping or skipping several minutes of random stories? This seems pretty basic folks…

iOS app crashing. Have to delete and redownload every few days to get stations to play at all

Put the playlist back. Can’t give it any more stars until the playlist feature that was removed is added back

Used to be good. This is lousy. Nothing works except the donate button.

No continuing play. Someone please fix the problem of no automatically continue playing.

Can’t stream stations anymore. One used to be able to stream npr stations from all over the US, a HUGE feature of this app. Now that feature is completely gone, and it’s useless for me. That makes no sense. Bye, NPR.

Great. Don't people realize this is American public radio, not Canadian. Come on guys, they don't provide Canadian streams, that's not what they do. This is very elegant and a treat to use. It would be nice to save programs instead of streaming them( while getting fleased by rogers data plan when not on wifi).

NPR11. Where is the ‘by program’ choice! Agree that it’s too cluttered

Very Satisfied. Great content and user friendly app. Easy to navigate.

Request. Great app. Please add night mode icon.

Best news station and app.. NPR is literally the best news station we have left.

terrible update. sooooo sorry i traded in a well designed, concise, uncluttered, version for this newer version. just awful interface. confusing to navigate. shows only a few past episodes for any given show. can’t seem to locate older shows or segments i may not have had a chance to listen to previously. too little info per page means much, much more button pushing than previously. really bad update. suggest you stick with what you’ve got until this developer unclutters and returns to a more streamlined offering. a real drag for me as i love the programs that npr produces. but this app update.... get me out of here! hate when this happens. get it together npr.

Objective in a subjective world. News that has a balanced appeal and is thought provoking

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Playback Speed feature is AWESOME. Long time listener so always felt that the NOT screaming morning DJ tone and speed of the news helped ease me into the day. But, lately, sometimes find myself just needing to get the news or new ideas quickly because of time constraints. Am playing back at 2x and it is completely understandable, maybe the soundclips of music sometimes feel like the latest-remix house version but that s chill. More important things than Oasis band reunion going on in the world. But yeah, thank you for the option. I swear i saw it advertised as a new feature but if it was an older one, then by all means, i m glad i found it now. Smiley face.

Missing a lot of key features from old app. I’m fine with the basic layout of this app, but some key features are missing that make this version significantly less functional for me. First, there’s no personal playlist option, and as a result, you have to listen to an entire program (ex: Morning Edition) at once. The only other option is to manually go in to the program and play each story one at a time. The playlist feature in the old app allowed me to add stories, podcasts, other programs, etc. into a single list, and would play them all in an order of my choosing. There is no way to curate a list of of stories/programs you’d like to listen to in this app. Second, the daily programs (Morning Edition, All Things Considered) only list the stories from the most recent broadcast. The previous app had stories from broadcasts going back 3 days. Half the time I am using the app to catch up on missed stories. I have found myself digging old devices out of drawers so that I can find yesterday’s news stories using the old app. Finally, if you pause whatever program you’re listening to for too long, the app won’t save your spot. Overall, I get mad pretty much every time I try to use this app. I love NPR, but am disappointed in this app.

Taking the News out of NPR. This app has shortcomings, like not being able to look back at stories that just played, nor being able to play the headline stories on demand. Sometimes I just want the news, and don’t want to hear about the 93 y.o. Appalachian woman who took up haiku after a lifetime of welding. And sometimes I do. But I cannot just get the top news stories to play. More annoyingly, when I have just heard a story, if I want to replay it because of a distraction, once it has played, there is no going back to find it again. It is gone forever, even after undertaking a google site search on my desktop computer focusing on ALL the keywords in the story. It appears that an algorithm cues up what to play next, and so far I cannot tell the rhyme or reason, nor can I prevent a launch into a TWENTY-SEVEN (27) MINUTE story that is only marginally newsworthy. And I absolutely love NPR. Not the app so much!

Craps out, commercial interruptions. I’m a huge fan of PBS and NPR but there are better ways to listen to NPR than this ap. It stops… It simply stops inadvertently, usually, of course, in the middle of something interesting. And while this may not be a function specific to this ap, although it may, commercial sponsorship interruptions are also frustrating. Right in the middle of a segment, even in the middle of a sentence, a commercial is inserted! I’m serious! And when we first check in, we’re hit with 1, 2, even 3 commercials, even if we’ve left, however involuntarily (see above), and re-join. This might all be less noticeable, less objectionable were it not for the contrast of other npr aps, like RadioIQ, to which I also listen. Yes, it just happened again, prodding this rant, long in the making.

PLAYLISTS or DEATH!!. This app is going to get someone KILLED. I’m serious. Bring back the PLAYLISTS! Without the ability to play selected stories and shows for a long period makes this app DANGEROUS on the road, if not DEADLY. I’m not sure how to make it any clearer. The new design of the app is horrible. Not only did they get rid of the best feature, but it erased my playlist of stories that I had accumulated over several months, many of which I would share with others long after hearing them myself. In my market, there’s more than one station, so now I have to change the home station every time I want to hear a different one. And those in other markets? Too bad! And where’s the list of shows? HORRIBLE app. HORRIFIC update. It seems the people who did the npr One app (also terrible) have infected Npr News app as well. Please AVOID using this app in the car. It’s just not safe. Even better, just avoid it altogether and definitely DO NOT UPDATE YOUR OLD VERSION!!

How on God’s green earth has this app been so bad for so long?. I’ve been forced to use this app for years, and I absolutely hate it. Shows you’re interested in or didn’t get to finish are hard to find, there’s a button to jump forward to the next track but there’s no way to jump forward 30 seconds or anything like that. Conversely, you can rewind 15 seconds at a time but there’s no way to go back to the previous track or start over. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally jumped to the next track and been unable to find what I was listening to (Sometimes it’s because I’m driving and I just can’t have my eyes off the road while I dig through the awful menu.) In short, this app is a disgrace and I can’t believe how long it’s been since they’ve updated it. I’m pretty sure I remember using this app before the 2016 election and being equally irritated. I wouldn’t pay even $.25 for this app!

Could Be Better. This is really more of an All Things Considered, Weekend Edition, and Morning Edition app; those shows make up most of the content that constantly refreshes on the main “Topics” and “Home” tabs. There’s an ever-updating stream of articles as well. The highlight is the playlist feature, which allows you to create a custom playlist of only the segments you want to listen to. This can also include other NPR podcasts hosted thru the app, of which there were a little over 30 last I checked. If you tell the app what your local npr station is, you’ll see any podcasts they have too. Despite that, the app needs better integration with local npr news stations. You can’t read local news stories, and the 2-3 minute local news update disappears after 7pm for some reason even though I know my station does it every hour after that. I’d also like a “wire” or “just in” tab to see every story coming in as it’s published, like on the Reuters and Euronews apps. They seem to constantly be tinkering with the app; keep leaving/updating your reviews and tell them what improvements they should make.

Terrible “Update”. If you still have the old version, don’t update! I’m lucky to still have it on my phone, and stream NPR from my phone rather than my other devices to avoid using the new app. Although I am an avid fan and a sustaining member of my local NPR station, I do like to browse the content of other NPR stations. I also contribute to the production of podcasts I enjoy on other stations. In the old app, it was possible to browse other stations and save them as favorites so I had the option of listening to programs at a more convenient time if I missed it on my local station. I also could line up playlists to listen to while driving. It’s now impossible to easily browse the whole range of stations and stories or arrange playlists on this disorganized mess. I’m a huge fan of NPR, but I hate this app. Developers, come to your senses soon and ditch this disaster before contributors become annoyed. Give us back the old app, please!!

Missing the old app. The NPR news app used to be my favorite app and I recommended it highly. It was easy to scroll through the stories and read headlines, and my favorite part was being able to build a playlist of stories that I found interesting. I would build a playlist in the morning to listen to on my walk or bus ride to work or while running errands. Now that feature is gone, and it’s time consuming to navigate the app and have to select each story individually. Who wants to dig their phone out of their pocket or back every few minutes to select another story? The update rendered the app effectively useless for me, it’s now the same as any other news app or website. I sincerely hope they bring the playlist feature back, however if it stays this non-user friendly I will probably delete it with a heavy heart.

This app is trash.. Want to spend 2 minutes trying to find a 5 minute newscast and then be subjected to 2 minutes of advertising, well then this app is for you. Confusing and convoluted layout with no way to shortcut your regular use case, do you know what dark patterns are? This is the the Dark Pattern King. Some intern convinced them increased engagement with the UI was a good thing when in fact it was their users boiling with rage and plotting revenge. All advertising all the time and no skip button. Do you want to limit your listening to what you selected? Well sorry that’s not allowed we will insert segments and tag on shows to the end, ad nauseam. The old news app was bad, but at least I had single routine of 7 clicks to setup what I wanted in the morning and evening. How anyone could have approved and released this piece of junk is beyond comprehension.

Forced into using NPR One. Last year after removing programs from the News App and encouraging users to use NPR one, the NPR news app came out with a statement that they received a lot of feedback from users who didn’t want to use NPR One. In response, they had added programs like On Point back to the app. Now they’ve gone a completely different direction, removing many features from the News App, and making only recent episodes of popular shows like Fresh Air available on the news app. Users can no longer make their own playlists of individual stories from many programs. Users cannot close the app and reopen to pick up where they last left off on a program. It takes many more clicks to get to a program now than it did before. Serious listeners are now forced to get NPR One, the app I thought NPR had taken negative feedback on and was scaling back. Disappointed to lose the old news app features and functionality.

Terrible update. The new update is terrible! I just want to be able to listen to the top of the hour 5 min news update and either morning edition or All Things Considered- but not only is it buried down the page- the Hourly News Update button doesn’t work! Why do you make it so hard to just listen to the news? I don’t want all the other links, programs, podcasts. Just put a link at the top of the page for the normal access to the news. I don’t want a minute of ads and lead-ins and welcome messages, which just wastes my time because I have to skip thru (which I don’t want to have to mess with while I am driving!). Just the news, story titles listed and played in order, not a random playlist. Looks like I’m going to have to delete this app and use the morning edition/atc podcasts instead. Not sure how to get the “Hourly News Update” back, tho

Bring back my playlist!. I just don’t get it! Went to the “help and feedback” section of the new app because I couldn’t find my playlist anymore and literally ALL of my favorite features of the old app are gone! I used to cherry pick stories from different NPR programs, and sometimes different days of those programs, and create a playlist to listen to every night. No more, because NPR took all the best features and threw them out!! I shed a tear last night, not having my nighttime listening, and have a feeling this new app will sit unused on my phone, if I don’t outright delete it. Honestly, DO NOT UPDATE. It’s a huge step down/backwards (and their app has always had glitches and problems since I started using it years ago). I also don’t like my local public radio station much and I don’t want to be forced to listen to it! I wish I could un-do this. Truly. NPR, why did you do this???

Needs additional customization options. Breaking news notifications are great, but only when they are truly about critical new information that may immediately impact my life. It feels like NPR often abuses the “breaking” classification just to send midday push notifications and drive traffic to the app/site. For example, I just got an alert about the 93-year-old woman visiting every national park. Interesting? Maybe. But definitely not worthy of interrupting my workday nor in any way relevant to the immediate health or welfare of my family. It would be fantastic to be able to choose what types of “breaking” news I receive notifications about, or at the very least for NPR to be more judicious in its use of push notifications.

Old app had better options for listening to shows. The old app had the ability to add and delete individual stories ( morning edition and all things considered etc) from your play list without constantly monitoring the app to skip stories you didn’t want to listen to. Many of us listen to this while we’re driving and not having that ability causes a significant distraction while on the road. Please bring back the ability to build our own playlists. Having said this , I realize that you can remove the unwanted articles once your in the playlist but it would be better to include the add button for each story on the front end instead of the add all. Otherwise app is ok I would also like to see you add a link to the playlist prominently displayed on the opening page /banner

Really you guys have to do better. I LOVE NPR. But I really dislike this app. It’s soooo hard to navigate. I can’t find the shows I want or listen to them they way I want. I feel you keep forcing all you other shows down my throat & not giving me the opportunity to dive deeper into the shows I love & want to listen to. I keep deleting the ridiculous app. Then putting it back when you mess up my WONDERFUL, perfectly fine regular NPR app. Now I can’t fully listen to the shows I want there like morning editions a Saturday & Sunday. But I can’t easily find them &’once I do they don’t play the entire show as I would expect. I get sooo frustrated & now you lose a loyal listener to a program. Why are you doing this STOP, please STOP. I could add more to this list. But I’ll stop myself & see I f I can find the full show on regular Apple podcast or them just go to he internet & see if I can fully listen to the show. It really really really shouldn’t be this hard!!! Sorry Lulu another Sunday where I’ll miss the puzzler :(

Your update is awful. No more favorite stations list. Oh, I should have looked at the reviews before I updated. Why did you get rid of the favorite stations feature? I like to wake up late in PA and click on my saved favorite in CA to listen to the morning news. Also, every station has its own special shows and using the favorite station feature made it possible to listen to them. Now we get to choose one favorite station and have to eliminate that one station to waste time and data to look up another “favorite” station. Please put this feature back in. Also, pretty pictures are not needed. We can read. Please go back to the compact list of many things to listen to displayed in words instead of pictures. Takes up too much data stream and too much time to load.

Miss the Queue Function. I’ve been an avid NPR listener for several years now, and I love the quality and variety of podcasts I can listen to, especially at work when I’m working on spreadsheets. That said, I’m already missing the playlist function. In the morning, I could spend a few minutes adding all the podcasts I wanted to listen to into one long queue without interruption. Now, I have to open up the app and click each pod individually. This especially deters me from listening to the shorter news podcasts that I normally enjoy, as it is too distracting to have to mess with my phone every few minutes. NPR, please add some form of this function back!! Sincerely, a devoted listener

Why deemphasize live streaming?. The current app defaults to NPR One with my local co tent instead of the live stream from my local radio. I like the idea of NPR One, but that’s now how I listen to the radio in the morning- I know when newscasts happen and shows change and I can’t tell time using the NPR One stream. Why can’t I pick my station stream and make that play by default when I open the app? Also, Audible and my third-party podcast app seem to be able to pause and recover a stream using the AirPod controls much more reliably than this app. The NPR stream drops when I switch from WiFi to 5g and doesn’t recover with a button press, and it frequently won’t restart if I pause it for a second to speak to someone, so I have to get out the phone and navigate to the play button again.

Why did you change it???. The old app worked fine. I was able to go to any show I wanted to listen to very easily. There was a great little menu bar at the bottom to go to the show list quickly or straight to my playlist. Why oh why would you get rid of that wonderful menu? With the new design, the thing that needed to be included was to be able to “favorite” a show, and then put everything we liked in the menu of “my NPR“. But now, we have to keep scrolling down to try and find the show we want to listen to. I shouldn’t need to scroll down past the news headlines to find what I’m looking for. You need to be mindful of how people are using this app and under what circumstances. A listening app needs to be easily navigable for a person who is half asleep in the morning with as few clicks as possible. Your app has now lost this characteristic.

Dropping connection when switching between WiFi and cell signal. This issue plagued the old app and I was happy to see the redesign, assuming they would resolve this long term bug. They didn’t. Essentially the app stops steaming every time you switch the data connection. Ex listening while at home on WiFi then walking out. My iPhone obviously automatically picks up the cell signal and keeps a continuous internet connection. The npr app however stops playing entirely. Not just a small delay to make the new connection routed thru my cell service but stops playing entirely. I have to reopen the app and hit stop then play again to make it work. The old NPR app required a forced close of the app which the new version does not. So a small improvement

Lost in Translation. NPR delivers the world. The new app delivers your back yard station with world news stories. I can get that by tuning my radio. I want more. I travel and I listen to NPR. I have favorite stations and programs all over the country. My list of FAVORITE stations was more than 30 deep when the new app update wiped clean my ability to hold the stations and their content close at hand. No longer can I easily tune into KUAF on Friday nights, WETS early on Saturday morning, KEXP on Saturday afternoon, KDFC on Sundays or Jazz Decades on WGBH whenever the mood strikes. I now must search for the station each time I want to listen and hope the station participates in the new streaming interface. Some stations are no longer available through the new app. Others have reduced content. The news does not seem improved outside of the graphic interface. My personal enjoyment of NPR has been drastically impacted.

Bring back the playlist !!. At the end of the day with the old app I would look at Morning Edition and All Things Considered, pick out the most interesting stories and save them in a playlist. I had my own customized list of stories that I was interested in. I would hit play and wouldn’t have to touch the phone for 30 minutes or so. When one story was over the next one on the list would begin to play automatically. You can no longer do that in this new app. You can only listen to one story at a time and when that story is over you have to go back to the list click play on another story you want to hear and keep repeating that same process over and over again. Why does NPR think that providing less customization is a good thing? As a consequence and now no longer use the app at all...very disappointing.

Unhappy with the new app. I was using NPR app — not NPR One! — because i didn’t like the UI on NPR One. With the latest update i guess they’ve combined them, but the new app is so frustrating that i just deleted it. The layout is very confusing, with way too many screens-on-top-of-screens. When i finally found Morning Edition and added it to my playlist, it brought up my playlist as a overlay screen, but when i backed out of that screen i was still on the Podcast menu. Hey, where did my playlist go? I finally found it on the My NPR tab, but even then, the full playlist is only available as yet another screen-on-top-of screen. And apparently when it finishes my playlist, it just decides to go on into some other NPR program. That’s not what i wanted. What do you not understand about how playlists are supposed to work?

Uggh! Your 11/23 redesign ruined the app. Why do people always fix what isn’t broken and ruin it?! Until today, I literally used this app constantly all day, streaming music from different regional and national NPR stations I saved to access instantly, as well as playing national news on demand every hour until the PBS NewsHour at 6 PM. Now you have ended all that and replaced it with clutter I don’t want. My iOS podcast app is all I need for podcasts. I prefer having all podcasts in one app. I don’t need yours here too. When I want to hear the latest news on demand, you now force me to play your curated, chopped up NPR One mix, which I’ve never had any interest in or I would have chosen to download its app in the past. If you must add it to the NPR app, fine. Just don’t combine it with hourly news on demand and force me to listen to it. Keep it as a separate section like the podcast clutter. Equally destructive, I no longer can save multiple regional and national stations but must be limited to only one saved at a time. And my main regional NPR station, which I’ve donated to, doesn’t even show up in the search. To listen to it, now I have to switch to their app. Wow. Just SO disappointing. I wish you’d just bring back the far superior app. I imagine I’ll entirely drop the NPR app due to the extreme limitations and inferiority of the new design.

Still improving. My previous review of this app many years ago was that the stream of my local station would not play, usually after an iOS update. This was when the NPR app was the NPR app. Interestingly, my closing comment about it was that it was still far superior to the “NPR One” app which I would be “encouraged” to try. Occasionally I did but never kept it for many user unfriendly reasons. Long since that app and the NPR One app were merged. Some of the reasons I didn’t use it have continued to be here, though happily the developers appear to be listening to the critiques and slowly improve it however it is still less simple and user friendly than the old app. We now have a toggle to stop continuous play. Very recently a way to curate a playlist was added. Navigating is not as straightforward as it could be, nor are the pages well designed so I find myself going back and forth. On the podcast page, at the top, there is a list of programs, however this is not a favorite list and the list changes. The result is my change from 1 star to 3 stars for this app (by comparison the old app would be 5 stars). I look forward to more improvements! Many thanks to the developers!

Zero stars- can you just make it easier to stream my radio station?. If I have to pause for a moment to do something, I need it to start playing again when I hit the ’play’ icon on my audio controls on my phone’s Lock Screen, like every other app, EVER! Instead I have to go back into the app, hit the app’s ’play’ button, usually several times. Right now I’m writing this review because I can’t get it to start streaming again after an incident just like this. I was excited to see the update, and so disappointed that it seems not to have addressed basic functionality like this. I’m going back to TuneIn radio. At least they’re able to stream properly. Update: the app asked me to reset my password, but then won’t return me to the login page. I just can’t understand how they can mess up an app whose functionality should be so basic: just play the radio!

Love NPR, but not their apps :(. As an American living abroad, I depend on the NPR apps to listen. Unfortunately, NPR is under the impression that we shouldn’t be able to easily manage our own playlists. In NPR One, it was darn near impossible- I really hated the experience, as much as I listen to a wide range of NPR shows, I want to be able to choose what I listen to and when. The new upgrade doesn’t allow you to manage your playlist. If you already listened to half of Morning Edition and want to listen to something else then come back, you have to manually fast forward the first part of the show. There is no playlist queue when you find something you like (possible on the old version). Too bad! The browsing features are nice, but please, please let us control our playlists again, NPR!

Glitchy since upgrade. I’ve had consistent problems with this app since upgrade. It always defaults to random programming or podcasts, sometimes changing when I’m in the process of listening. Seems a lot of folks listen to podcasts, but it should easier to access the live stream or should learn to just pick up from where the listener last listened by hitting the play button. Also frustratingly, the stream just stops and never starts again. Sometimes it’s breaking from wifi and going back, but sometimes it just randomly stops. The old app would at least pick the stream back up, even though an add would play. If I’m out and about or apart from my phone, I have to stop what I’m doing, get it out of my bag, take my gloves off, open the app and hit play (hitting play from the Lock Screen does not do anything). Difficult to listen to now and rather frustrating.

Absolutely AWFUL redo that completely ruined WAS an amazing app. On what planet is the new NPR app considered an improvement???? This new app breaks my heart and only leads me to curse the change. Early and often. And then look for great audio content elsewhere. NPR went from being my favorite app that I loved and used multiple times a day to being one that feels like a useless annoying waste of space on my phone. You took away pretty much everything I loved about the NPR app - the playlist function, the easy search function, being able to search by show and find and select individual stories. Now I have to wade through a bunch of annoyingly messy “headlines” and try to figure out which stories actually have audio and hope they are things I actually want to listen to?? I can’t just go to my favorite shows and scroll through. It’s also awkward to try to share things. Everything about this new app absolutely stinks. Who were the idiots who actually thought this was a good idea?

I wish I didn’t update the NPR app. I wish I didn’t update the app, because I didn’t realize the new version was basically a podcast and listening app. I just want an app where I can read stories from the comfort of my kitchen table. I am not the kind of user who has time to listen to every story. The app was great before, but they slowly kept replacing written stories with audio-only stories. If I wanted to listen to NPR, I would get in my car and turn on the radio. Secondly, the ads have gotten worse and I can’t tell you how many times I accidentally clicked on an ad simply because I was trying to open an article. I understand NPR needs ads to support themselves, but I sure with my yearly NPR donation could go towards an option to remove ads from my experience. The app is now a podcast app, and I already have another favored podcast app so I am less likely to use the new NPR app.

Awful. The new NPR News app is simply the pits. Just awful. The developers have said they made changes based on all the great feedback. What a joke. They have ignored the single biggest complaint from all the bad reviews – the loss of the playlist function. The old app was great. I could cue up the stories I wanted to listen to, on my own terms and on my own schedule. Now, I am forced to listen to one of a few options that are available at any given time. If I want to finish listening to a story that I started yesterday, guess what? Yep, I am out of luck. If someone tells me about a story, I can no longer go back to old shows and pull it up. I cannot forward stories that I like to others. All the stories have the same insipid artwork instead of the relevant story-related photos they used to have. Plus I have to listen to that insipid NPR One advertisement every single day. Boo. NPR has taken away a great, user-focused app and crammed garbage down our throats.

NPR News. This is the NPR application I remember from the past that served me all the content I wanted whether it be daily news stories from many subjects, features of interesting topics or observations of the unique realities of our daily lives. While over the past few years NPR has had several applications that where limited or didn't work properly. This version of NPR News is neither limited and it works properly. It is also easy to browse for articles as well as seeking out audio to listen to. Both stories and audio can be saved to read or listen to later. I recommend this as the best NPR application for people to download as you get everything which makes National Public Radio great to read and listen to.

Very disappointing!. I rate NPR 5 stars but I rate this app one star. You took away the Playlist. I used to go to different programs and selectively add to my playlist and just have it all play at once. Great when driving long distance or when doing other things while listening. Now I can only listen to one story at a time then go browse again and listen to the next one. This is not practical and now time consuming especially in the morning when getting ready for work. You also took away the search option which was an Amazing feature to search by topic or name and then read or listen. Programs is now On Demand but in programs it was a quick scroll through to get to the program you want to read or listen to. I can get used to the new look and icons, and I understand you want to bring the app up to date, but please don’t take away the playlist and the search feature. I can get used to everything else. That being said I love and appreciate all what you do!

Don't update if you like listening to NPR stories. Wow... This update is a huge step backwards. First off, much bigger ads that take up half the stream. Secondly this is NPR - National Public RADIO not National Public Reading. The focus on written articles seems counter to the whole Radio part... You used to be able to add stories to a playlist and then listen through the stories you wanted. That's all I want out of this app but that no longer works. The UI is atrocious and makes no sense compared to the previous version. It's basically unusable if you want to pick and choose stirs to listen to... But if you want to read them then I guess it's ok except that's kinda but the point of a radio app. Honestly I don't know what the app designers were thinking with this update and I doubt I'll use the app much anymore because it requires far too much work to try and pick and choose stories to listen to...

Sooo many problems.. I’ve been using this app on my commute to work for the past year, not to listen to NPR One, but my local-ish station, which I can’t get over the air in my car. Since this last update it has been nothing but trouble. First of all, it seems to drop the stream when I get around a particular intersection. Might be changing cell towers(?), but it’s pretty consistent every time. Have to close the app and wait several minutes and try again or it won’t come back. Today I noticed that the battery in my phone is much lower than it should be for this time of day. Turns out this app is responsible for 71% of today’s battery draw and I didn’t even open the app today. Wish you guys hadn’t messed with it. The UI stuff, NPR One thing (not a fan), podcasts, those changes I can live with, but these bugs make using this app a frustrating experience. Please fix it.

Buggy.... I like that the shows and podcasts are now available as icons to easily tap and add new shows but why lose the favorite function ? I still would like to keep the top four I use frequently in my favorites. Right now the playlist function does not work despite force restarting the app several times. Even when tapping the play function for the entire playlist only one clip plays. So you have to tap each item on the list separately. There are numerous smaller bugs such as problems with the refresh function on the “on demand” page and the wrong clip sometimes plays when tapping on another. Not sure whether intentional or a bug- but you also cannot replay the national newscast. Once it has played no amount of tapping on the play button will play the clip again. when is the update coming ?

Invaluable to me. I often use it to catch stories I missed. Sometimes, I use it to share stories with others. My only complaint is that it get hung up on certain stories and shuts my phone down. I then have to wait dozens of seconds for it to come back on. It seems to happen only with stories that have full text rather than just a brief description. Often when it comes back on, it jumps ahead to 41 seconds into the story. I usually can prevent it from shutting down if I use a finger to move the text up and down on my screen. It's annoying, but I put up with it because I value NPR News so much.

Come on NPR, you can do better.. I wrote a review earlier and heard back from you guys that you’re working on improvements to the constant audio dropouts. One month later, it’s still happening. I’m streaming live radio (WAMU in DC) and the audio stops for no reason. The “play” button stays paused and I can’t do anything. So I’m forced to shut down the app, reselect my favorite station (why do I need to do that every time I use the app.. really??), and press “play” again. After another lag, the audio *might* start again if I’m lucky. Things went from bad to worse this morning when I launched the app around 7:45 AM, driving on Fairfax County parkway, and the audio streamed fine but the audio quality was absolutely abominable. It sounded like a 128k mono mp3 that was being filtered through damp toilet paper. I’m this close to deleting the app guys. Step up your game please.

Meh - always crashes. This app crashes all the time, i usually have to restart 3-4 times to read an entire article (yes, it is up to date) or when listening to my local station through the app. So i have resorted to just reading the first few lines of an article and if i,m really interested, i google the article and read it on a browser. Very not cool. Also, you cannot enlarge pictures. When using a phone, sometimes you just want to actually see what you’re loking at, whats the harm in allowing that? One feature that does seem to work with this new upgrade is i can now email or text articles to myself or others without the app crashing. I also like accessing the many podcasts in one place. So npr gets an A, this app gets a C.

Scary Times. I have been extremely disappointed in the fact that Nazi type ideology and extreme bigotry has been aloud to fester under the dirty sheets of Americas beautiful lands, and brought to the lime light through non-action from our leaders. As a white man, with a grandfather who fought the Nazi's in WWII, it disgusts me! I have to say that NPR has been a calming embrace with, in my opinion, the worlds most objective, rational and responsible journalists and stories. Their is much anger growing in me about our current political/racial discord that it has been my wife and close family (the ones with the same shared human right core values) and NPR who have helped me see where it is that I can help, constructively, and still protest, peacefully. Thank you NPR!

New app is a dud. NPR - did you beta test this new app at all!?! I am a lifelong NPR news junky—I stream Morning Edition and ATC daily. My hunch is that the intention of the app redesign is to add significant friction to the experience of a listener like me, making it much harder to navigate to the news shows and forcing me to awkwardly wade through a clunky morass of other products every day in the hopes that I’ll end up broadening my listening diet. But the result is mostly unnecessary friction . . . and constant glitches. . . and user frustration. One annoying glitch: half the time the delete function doesn’t work in the playlist. So I add all the content of a news show, but can’t edit any of the pieces out (e.g. when NPR repeats pieces across ME and ATC or WE, an increasing practice). Often you can swipe left and get the delete button to appear, but when you press delete nothing happens. The old app was simple, streamlined, intuitive. The new one is none of these things. ☹️

Huge step backwards. Ahhh! Just updated to iOS 11 (from 10) and that seemed to have automatically triggered a new (& definitely not improved NPR app). What happened to my playlist?! Of course I lost several stories that were saved there that I was planning to listen to later, but how do I even go about finding them again on this new app? There’s not even a general search box anymore. And even if I did find them, it looks like there is no more playlist feature anyway. I guess we are forced to search for and listen to one story at a time? Or just listen to all stories in a program (like ATC)? I really liked being able to select only the stories I was interested in. I could go on about the missing Favorites Stations, but it looks like many other reviewers are already pointing out that shortcoming. Hope NPR takes its listeners’ comments seriously and improves what so far is a step backwards for their app.

Useless station finder, et al. Dear NPR: you’ve prioritized fancy graphics over functionality w/ this update, so existing features are now gone. Here are the issues: 1) find nearby stations:: many stations don’t display their channel #, favoring displayed ™ call letters. For example, KPCC (& others) doesn’t display its channel number, making it useless for programming a car radio for a large region like SoCal, so I can’t set my radio for long drives; my choices would be to do without or fiddle with my iPhone while !!!driving!!! 2) no alternative to streaming:: so I can’t download daily programs like Morning Edition; Previously, I had a downloaded set of stories and didn’t miss anything. Now, I have to hunt around but still can’t download the desired story if I find it; when I’m commuting by rail or car, losing a signal disrupts listening; a downloaded Morning Edition avoids that problem. Please correct these problems.

Good first try at revamping. Have been using the NPR app for years as my go-to-first-in-morning news provider. The redesign is ok and having a personal page with grouped categories is nice, but it irks me that the national news 5 min segment is shortened to 3 and I’m immediately pushed into stories i don’t necessarily want to hear ….and i cant delete them; they just sit there till they rotate off. I miss also, as it seems others do, being able to choose other NPR stations from across the country, as i have friends and family around the country and it always helped to connect me a bit more when in conversation with them, to know a bit more about their local situation. Please listen to the listeners and consider some tweaks!

New App lacks a lot of functionality from old app. As a software product manager, I would be burned at the stake if I brought out a new version of my software that dropped an important feature as this version has from its predecessor. - One can only save a *single* station to an account as a “primary”. This is a problem as I’ve lived in different places and enjoy listening to those local stations and don’t want to look them up each and every time. I used to have a list of favorites on the old app that would be used to cycle through these stations. No longer. Big miss, NPR app developers. - This appears to be a defect, but since it hasn’t been fixed (and the new app has been out for awhile), the saved “primary” station gets erased after the app is closed. Why even bother offering the “primary” station if it gets dropped every time the app is restarted (reboot, swiped closed / reopened, etc.)?

I love NPR- app needs some slight tweaks. Honestly, I love NPR and everything it gives me! It is about the only news source I feel like I can trust. The app is a bit finicky. I don’t like that when listening to the news, every pause triggers the “thank you for listening to NPR on our streaming app” ad. It triggers if my phone alarm goes off, receive a spam call (that I don’t even answer), or even if I accidentally press the pause button. It needs some “tracking” to allow users to pause for a couple minutes without the app ad- I already know I am listening to NPR on the streaming ad...you don’t need to remind me! It’s frustrating because in my house, I need to pause frequently...not to mention in these political times, I cannot control the amount of spam calls...

Option to close audio player?. As a user of this app I would love to be able to hide the audio player completely, so that I can have more of my screen be visible while reading content. I know I can shrink it down and expand it back up, but it would be nice to have the option to close it altogether when I’m not listening to anything. Then it could just open up again when I click play on some audio content or an audio-related navigation item. I also find the automatic horizontal scrolling text within the audio player (to show the full title of the audio segment) distracting when I am trying to read other content. Best of luck continuing to improve this app!

Roll back please!. Once again NPR has successfully “improved” upon an excellent app by creating an inferior one. The drastic new interface changes are innovative for the sake of being innovative, and only serve to limit or confound the experience of the user. By eliminating the “now playing” queue, NPR has also limited users’ ability interrupt play for other smartphone functions: there is no longer an ability to take a phone call and then return to where you left off. The app reloads to the start page with no bookmark to what program you were listening or how far into it you were. Also problematic is how the app determines your local station - though I have manually selected my local station, I am frequently diverted to another one that is 1000 miles away. All of this would be bearable, at least, if with this new rollout NPR didn’t also take the opportunity to eliminate options it had previously offered. Don’t waste time looking for reruns of Car Talk! It is no longer available here.

I almost cried..... I am a teacher who used the old npr news app in my classroom weekly. I could browse individual newscasts, save them to my playlist, prepare mini lesson plans around them, and I could play the newscasts in my classroom three periods in a row. I could even search relevant topics like Henrietta Lacks for use during Black History month. Many of my students even commented that current events with npr news was their favorite part of class. I did not know the app had changed. I simply opened it to scan for news to save to my playlist and found everything gone. My saved playlists, the ability to download individual newscasts to a playlist, everything. I almost cried. The npr one app doesn’t have any of that functionality either. NPR. I’m so disappointed. I feel so frustrated that I can’t bring your newscasts into my classroom anymore for my students. PLEASE restore the old npr news app.