I love this mag. I mean I really do (Econ Major at UCO btw). The only complaint I have is the excess of ads despite me paying the full price. Otherwise I think that this is the most worthwhile news source to date. A lot of people used to consider The Economist to be a conservative newspaper, but truly I tell you that it has done a 180 in 2020, they really just use economics alone as their guiding subject. They were supporting the vaccine when it was first out and mostly a political issue. They don’t pander to leftists or conservatives very often or really at all. Also they take good critical letters from respected individuals in their letters section. I truly enjoy disagreeing with an article and then finding someone smarter than me who wrote exactly why it is wrong, I could go on and on about this magazine. I love the formatting (shorter less fiddly articles, with all of the facts and as little opinion as possible) and I’m definitely a lifelong customer as long as that Economist quality is retained. I also really enjoy how the economist never says we think that (…) they always say this is the way to fix it or just state things how they are based on economic indications. There is actual evidence to back up economics, rather than some crazy conservative conspiracy theory, or a radical leftist rant. I don’t think they’re always right but this leads to a level of honesty. Excellent customer service also.
I never personally thought I’d be writing a review for a news app. I’m a 21 year old college student and generally skeptical of news organizations. After taking a class with a heavy usage of Economist articles, I see why my professor uses them in his lesson plans: they’re factual. After multiple months of contemplating whether or not to get a subscription, I finally pulled the trigger. The app is almost seamless, minus a few features I wish I could have in the app like a search option and a viewing history for easier access to show my friends the articles (I wish I could give you all a half star less for this, but I’ll go with 5 stars because I enjoy the content so much). I feel as though I can put my trust in The Economist because they deliver the news in a digestible and palatable way. I enjoy being able to audibly listen to articles and understanding what’s going on in the world. If you’re tired of traditional American news companies like NBC, Fox, CBS, CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and many others, then try out The Economist. The Economist offers a new level of detail, honesty, factuality, and trust that I appreciate when it comes to news reporting. I intend to resubscribe for more after my introductory subscription. The Economist (as far as I understand) does not do editorials or opinion pieces. They offer well thought out news reporting and a deeper understanding of current events.
Great app overall. Putting three stars to elevate some of the issues I encountered in the new version. I’m using the app only in dark mode, if that’s helpful context. 1. Espresso is gone. Someone else mentioned here as well. 2. App state is lost too quickly. My reading style is to jump back and forth between this app and others (e.g. switch to Wikipedia mid-article and come back afterwards to resume the same article). Currently, the app cold starts into the main menu after being the background for about a minute. This is a significant annoyance for me. 3. Read-state check marks were reset locally after the update. These were great to keep track of my backlog in recent few weekly issues. If this is a one time thing, probably I can bear the disturbance however. 4. Read-state check marks are less visible (in dark mode) on the weekly tab compared to v2. This makes it harder to find unread articles in weekly issues. 5. Articles in daily view has advertisement boxes with no advertisements in them. They show empty gray space. While I’m here, I also would like to see the read-state synced to my account server-side. Having them local only is the only reason I read the Economist on just one device, and not iPad and phone together for instance. I hope this is helpful! Thank you for the great app the dev team! i
The Economist is my favorite news magazine and the app is easy to use and well designed. it is certainly one of the most reliable sources of analysis and information for me. However there are two areas which I find which the Economist fails to take its usual broad-minded approach of treating both sides of the issue., the first is the debate around climate change. The Economist has decided to editorially to accept the often one-sided claims of so-called climate alarmists. Although this is obviously an area where there is robust debate, tht Economist usually fails to provide the other side of the debate, which does not see the world was facing an imminent catastrophe due to climate change. There is simply too much evidence against the alarmist view to justify it being ignored. The other area has to do with race relations in the United States, in which parallel to the climate debate that usually takes a one-sided view, and fails to consider seriously the vast amounts of evidence rejecting the thesis of widespread racism in the United States. Nonetheless, it is brilliantly, written, engaging, and in most cases, except for those, I’ve indicated a real education which I learned from every week.
- I wish I could download all the images in advance for offline access, like I can for the text and the audio, and like I could with the classic app. At least the image streaming works better after the latest fixes. It is a huge data hog and increased my phone bill, so streaming over cellular isn’t a good option for me. - Audio needs a bit of love. Needs a 1.25x setting which would be the sweet spot for speed of playback. It frequently starts playing at the wrong speed. 15-second skip back should be the default back button for use in my car, rather than skip to the previous article. Narration sounds good. - It remembers where I was reading, but only one article... I can’t swipe to the next one in the weekly. - When re-finding my place, Clicking on the hamburger menu to find sections and then clicking on the section often doesn’t work. Other times the section headers are rendered offscreen, maybe after switching from landscape to portrait mode.
I started reading The Economist at around 16 (yes, really). It was recommended reading for passing my British army entrance tests and I’ve been a fan ever since. The idea of truly unbiased journalism is a myth - as soon as one picks up a pen or a camera, they are biased. What is included or omitted is as much a part of bias as what opinion is deliberately conveyed. That said, I think The Economist does an excellent job of being balanced; and when it is taking a side, it says so - elections, wars, major debates. I particularly like the lack of affiliation of each piece and the ‘voice’ of the paper, I find it reduces grandstanding and personal politics (anyone willing to write for a paper that deliberately doesn’t give the author credit is alright by me). Then there’s the app. It can be read daily as a source of news or you can read the weekly edition ‘cover-to-cover’ as I do. If you’re looking for a great one-stop-shop for informed news, The Economist app is it.
I have loved this app and made it my primary means of accessing the content for more than one year now. With the latest update the audio playback seems ruined. Though the audio opens with each new issue and appears to automatically download, the playback takes several seconds, almost a minute in most cases to begin. It is almost as if the download restarts each time I open the app, and the audio files are not actually saved. Moreover the playback lasts for about half of an article, and if my screen turns off or I lock the phone, the playback and the app seem to crash. I am not sure what changed, but the stability of the app is terrible all of a sudden. Particularly with regard to the audio playback. I do like the new arrangement and layout of the ability to access the different audio articles, but there is no point if the articles won’t play.
I was compelled by a recent piece on the history of Russia’s attitudes towards Ukraine to post an enthusiastic, if disappointingly thinly answered, paean to the journalists of the Economist on my Facebook page. To be able to combine history, journalism and a spot of political philosophy in such a piece, in readable and lucid format, without dumbing down or preaching, and to do this sort of thing in five or six pieces week in, week out, takes more than impressive talent. It must demand application, which is belied by the impression of effortlessness it conveys. This, my friends, is real journalism. And I don’t always agree with what it is saying (although I must confess disproportionate alignment with content on an ongoing basis). Subscribing digitally, after years of enjoying the paper version and then enduring a long absence, was a very, very good idea. I flagellate myself for not reading more. The Economist deftly assuages some of these feelings.
I have taken the Economist for 30+ years. Nowhere else will I get news from around the world that has both economic considerations and political in depth but accessible. Once while coming back from the Middle East, there was a small article entitled, The moonshine capital of America, Franklin, County, Virginia. It was an accurate portrayal of the culture of SW Virginia. Add this to what is happening economically in equatorial Africa or Southeast Asia and you have quite a comprehensive mix of news and analysis. I’ve accepted the fact that I cannot read everything each week in the Economist so I never run out of articles of interest! My son reads the Economist on line and dedicates Thursday evening to the latest news. We both find the editorial commentary to be balanced and any biases transparent! This magazine is a refreshing breath of air in a world with so much unhelpful spin and fabrication!
I love economist but an app has a room for improvement: - No history of read articles. It’s difficult to comeback to an article I opened but didn’t finished. - Opened article flip back to the main page after few hours of inactivity. Coupled with lack of history if I haven’t finished reading an article and the app flipped to main page it’s annoying to try to find and re-open it again. I have to use bookmarks so I don’t loose what I read. - Bookmarks should sync across iOS devices. - It’s so annoying that I cannot easily continue to read same article on iPad after opening it up in iPhone. Apple News is an example of how to do it right. Coupled with separate bookmarks for iPhone and iPad it requires to use search.
Excellent content, terrible app. I use the app (and subscribe to The Economist) solely to listen to the audio edition. Usually I listen while doing something else: driving, riding a motorcycle, in the gym, on an airplane, etc. Usually I am also using other apps such as for navigation , and often with no or intermittent internet access. In older versions of the app, this was not a problem. There is an option to download the audio file and play it back through the app. However, updates over the past year have made this feature virtually unusable. Often it will randomly stop playing, and I need to pull over, restart the app (which restarts from the beginning of the edition) and then advance it to the right article. Sometimes it just doesn’t play at all. Why it would have such difficulty playing an already downloaded file is unclear, but I suspect there is some sort of over-aggressive anti-piracy feature interfering with smooth playback. If this is not resolved and the app remains unusable I will have no reason to maintain a subscription.
The news on The Economist is fantastic, as always. However, the app seems to be getting worse and worse. As near as I can tell, it is non-functional if you do not have an active Internet connection, despite the option of downloading entire issues. On top of that, even with an active connection, when it changes story an error often comes up saying “something went wrong”, and requiring action on the listener’s part before the next story plays. This is so bad that that I often just switch to a recorded book in frustration. The latest update seems to have made things even worse. Not only does the applications still run poorly when there is not an active Internet connection, but it has also gotten very slow to respond, and often starts playing all by itself minutes after I have stopped it. So I could be in the middle of a meeting, and suddenly everyone is surprised to hear my phone loudly reading a news story over the speaker. It is amazingly bad considering how good the rest of The Economist’s operations seem to be.
I used to love listening to The Economist audio edition until a particular feature was removed. I used to be able to organise my audio playlist in a specific order; the world this week, then the business section, then finance, and afterwards a few select articles chosen among the remaining sections. I was able to go through the edition and organise everything once, then start and stop listening with the confidence that the playlist remained in the order I prioritised. Now whenever I add to the audio playlist it's always ordered in the way The Economist is (The World This Week, Leaders, Letters, etc) and I can arrange the playlist to my priority, which I used to do for the past few years....now I don't even want to bother with The Economist at all since I now have to either keep track of what I listened to manually and/or keep adding/removing to the playlist in order to listen while I'm doing other tasks. Very unfortunate. It would be VERY much appreciated if the feature to customise the order of the audio playlist is made available once again. Thank you.
This a good news source. It’s very well done hence the two stars, however 1. It’s really expensive ($220 a year unless you complain and threaten to cancel) 2. I’m not sure what’s harder, a divorce or cancelling this news subscription. First you can’t do this easily on the app you have to go to, “contact us” on the app, look in the FAQ’s where you can then log in. At that point you find, “change my subscription”. There’s a button that says, “cancel my subscription”, you’re asked why, then you’re given a sales pitch in writing based on your reason. In order to move forward with the cancellation you’re required to chat with them! A sales representative joins the chat, then I was asked AGAIN to provide my name and address and why I wanted to cancel, they tried to keep me again by offering a discount. Finally the rep cancelled my subscription. This entire process took me over 20 minutes. Making it that hard to cancel on purpose so people give up and keep giving money is bad business.
Firstly, I’m an iOS user and get my content from the Economist primarily via audio. This content is fantastic - no complaints and gets five stars. But this is an app review and the app is frustrating for several reasons but primarily because I have no idea how to manage and use the audio “queue”. There is no obvious way to initiate the audio play feature except if you only care to play the audio from an article that is showing in the weekly section. In the Home Screen I want a nice big button that says “Audio Queue” it something like that and in which a means of adding you and deleting from the queue is possible. I have been using this app for over 5 yrs and this morning as I write this review, I have no idea how to start playing the selection of articles I was listening to yesterday!! This is awful! Economist, please fire your app developer and hire someone.. anyone else.
Screen sizing not correct. The main reading pane has to be resized when the carousel indicators are on the bottom or the audio status. These are covering the reading pane or part of a bottom ad. After you build an audio queue and close and reopen the app, the audio loading indicator spins and no way to play audio. This makes audio queueing unusable The audio queueing ux needs some thought. If you close the audio controls there is no way to get into edit mode without either going to the edition edit queue button under editions or restarting the app. If you use build queue under editions, you should be given option of adding to the start or end of an existing queue. Now it always puts selected articles at the end.
I challenge anyone on the dev team for this app to try reading the weekly edition. Start at the beginning and reas a few articles. Put it away. Come back in a few hours and pick up in the same place. Wait two days, find your place again, and read some more articles. If they were to do this, they would uncover multiple crippling, infuriating bugs that have gone unfixed for months. Articles will switch while you’re in the middle of reading them, all of a sudden you will go backwards by several articles. The app frequently doesn’t save your place, so every time you open it you need to go back through the table of contents to figure out where you were. This is a significant regression in functionality from how the app used to work, and it’s honestly embarrassing for a professionally produced app to have this many bugs of this severity sitting unfixed for this long. Stop building new features and fix your bugs!
I may be disabled from health issues. In the past couple years, I may have had to walk away from my CPA Firm I worked so hard to build, but my brain still wants to learn... just on its own timeline. The Economist App provides that for me... and how ever my body needs to take it in!! Days when my eyes struggle or concentration is tough due to pain, I can put in my AirPods and immerse into learning about the economic world via listening! If I can’t take in full articles, the morning briefings are perfect. Best if all, it gives me things to think about. And the ones that are still lingering around at dinner time, provide my husband and I something intelligent to discuss and mull over. Feels as if I may still “have it” ... Thank You.
I’ve been using the economist app for a little bit over 5 years now and have yet to have a consistent, bug free experience over a month long period. One of the following will generally stop working until the developers patch the app which can take 1-2 weeks: the audio will simply not play (even if downloaded), the app will crash (even if it is the only app open), the editions will not download or downloaded editions will not open, or some combination of all the above. This is not a review for the Economist as a publication, I’ve been an avid reader of the print edition since uni and I will continue to do so. However the lack of consistency with the app is disappointing. All the more troubling is the economist’s decision to move some of their podcasts onto the app for subscribers only which would be sound business decision if the infrastructure (the app they are migrating to) consistently worked.
I have only recently subscribed to the Economist and my initial impression is favorable. Your reporting is more balanced than what I am accustomed to from the Financial Times, the other European publication I read on a daily basis. I value the European perspective on "the American Experiment," still evolving after 243 years! There is a sense of desperation on the political Left in America. They want to be well received at Davos and will do and say anything to try to convince the world that we have abandoned the principles of our Revolution in favor of woke globalism. Nothing could further from the truth, most Americans have never heard of Davos and are not interested in the globalist ideas of President Obama, but you won't hear that from American media.
If you want to read the weekly magazine on your phone, this app is terrible. Weird jumps between and within articles—you’ll be reading and suddenly it jumps to a different part of the article or a different article entirely. It also doesn’t keep your place when you leave the app, which the old app did. And it has about 5 times as many ads. The new app also bombards you with notifications you can’t control. The same quality of journalism is there but the Economist should be embarrassed—the content is undermined by a broken experience. Stick with the legacy app. Update Aug 2024: the app is even slower, almost unusably. You open it, you wait, you click an article, you wait, you try to flip to another article, it hangs while it loads an ad, and frequently bumps to the top of an article so it can load an ad. I really want to like this app buts it's so awful vs. the old app. I'm on an iphone 13 pro. This is the slowest app I own.
Overall, the Economist is a decent app. however, if they want to make it better, here are the top things that they can do. 1. Create cliff notes for the articles that they write. Right now the Economist has lots of content, and may be hard to digest everything in a given week. If you’re able to create cliff notes, it will help make the takeaways easier for the readers 2. Improve audio distribution. Right now the audio overlay for the articles is technically clear, but hard to digest. Basically, you could have the article playing in your car and you may not even hear what they’re actually saying. Similarly, the tone of the article could easily put you to sleep 3. Add more diverse content - focus on historical look back. The Economist has a huge opportunity to be a thought Leader and more broad areas. I think one of the items I’d like to seem them do more of is do a look back on historical issues and do an analysis of what happened and maybe what were the causes that were unforeseen at the time. 4. Finally, The Economist needs an app for the Apple Watch. I would like to see this on the Apple Watch so I can listen to the audio files while on a run without my phone
This app overall is quite well done but there are two big flaws I wish they would fix. Both are a form of bloatware I believe: 1. There is an ad loaded/displayed between EVERY story. Come on! Plus the ads take a second or two to load, so that’s happening every time you flip between stories. 2. It almost never remembers my place: i.e. whenever I flip back to the app it almost always reloads to the Home Screen instead of the last article I was reading. I’m no developer but I assume this is because the app itself must be some kind of resource hog and so it’s getting killed in the background whenever I switch to something else. Please fix! It’s tedious to have to always bookmark my current story and then navigate back to it every time I switch to the app.
Audio playback has been fixed, but additional features would be appreciated
I’ve been subscribed to The Economist for several years and the audio edition has become my primary method of consumption. It’s very convenient to listen to the articles during my commute or while working around the house. The latest update seems to have fixed the audio playback issues where article audio would take forever to load and then crash somewhere in the middle, losing your progress. I haven’t had any of these issues since updating to the latest app version. I would give the app 5 stars but have taken off a star due to the lack of AirPlay support for the audio edition. I can play all my music and podcasts through my AirPlay speakers, but not The Economist - please add this.
The Economist article on Economics topics are generally of high quality and well documented and researched BUT those on the middle conflict and in particular those presenting facts about the actual events are biased and distorted. They cover up Israel crimes. Fir example when reporting about Gaza, the article don't miss to mention that Gaza is ruled by Hamas. Israel is also ruled by criminals. The article miss to mention that the people in Gaza are under siege and are in an open prison imposed by the racist and criminals ruling Israel. There is no human face of the Economist when reporting about Israel crimes. How do the Economist consider the Oppressed and the eco pied at the same footing as the oppressor and the occupier. "Conflict" is a dishonest way to report in an occupation where a whole generation of a whole nation was destroyed, killed, put in prison, dépréciés of basic human needs and even water just to be racially eliminated and deported from own home to live, if managed to survive, as refugees in foreign lands.
Love the economist, hate the app. The content and setup is good, but it is incredibly slow and laggy. I download issues to work offline or when I have bad service, but then the app takes 3 minutes to load in bad service areas while it tries to connect. Then there is a huge delay in opening articles and difficulty in getting to downloaded issues unless I open them up ahead of time before or lose service or get on a plane. If you minimize the app for two minutes to answer a text or read an email, there’s a high chance the app will reload from scratch - you’ll have to wait at the red screen of death for a while, then find your article and your place in it all over. Why not remember where we were reading? So slow. So laggy. On every device. Also, I downloaded the whole newspaper for offline - it’s taking enough space on my device that the graphics should load offline.
Update: The developer responded and said this issue will be fixed in the next release. Bumping from 2->4 stars, and will go to 5 once fixed! The 3.0 version of the app broke the ability to listen to multiple audio articles with the phone in your pocket. I used to be able to pick the first article in a section and then they would all auto play. Now when on cellular data, if the phone screen is locked, it isn’t able to load the audio for the next article; it shows a “Something went Wrong” error. This means at the end of every track I have to unlock the phone and click the retry button for it to work.
I initiated my love affair with The Economist at age 26, receiving the flimsy-paper airmail edition weekly when the definite article was the capitalized and part of its calling. It followed me in working stints in Chile, Brazil, and El Salvador. For me, the inventor of the “Big Mac Index of Currency Exchange Rates” represented the greatest English language news journal and the best source for world news(given McDonald’s closing its 850 stores in Russia, it leaves the Index in a bit of a bind, or does it switch to the cost of a liter of bottled water with the standard quart augmented by a 1.06 factor?), which kept me well rounded and which I relished. And now, some sixty years later, I feel the same way. Bravo Economist!
I’ve been subscribed to this app through iTunes for years, now all of a sudden it won’t let me log in. Also, I get a free membership to the Economist through my school’s library, and there’s no way to log into the app using that. I’ve been paying anyway, which was frustrating, and now it won’t even let me log in at all even though I’m paying for it. I’ve tried clicking the “Restore your purchase through iTunes” button and it gives me an error. I’ve tried logging on with user name and password and it tells me to log on through the iTunes option. I tried deleting and reinstalling the app, restarting my phone, and nothing seems to work. I’ve logged on successfully via the website, but it doesn’t have all the same features as the app, such as the Morning Briefing, which is what I primarily what I read every morning. I would give this zero or negative stars if possible because I currently can’t use it at all and it therefore provides me negative utility, due to all the time I’ve wasted trying to log on. If someone can help me resolve this, I will gladly update this review to 4 or 5 stars.
I love The Economist. It is a great newspaper and stays true to its founding mission. I loved the paper edition for all those years before we knew digital. I made the grudging transition to the digital edition. And in reality, it really was just the paper edition on a screen. It looked and navigated like the paper copy you had tucked in a pocket as you boarded your flight, only to pull it out once in your seat. And then someone in marketing, a new product manager I presume trying to make a name, decided it was time for a complete reboot of the app. “Let’s make it a contiguous stream of text”; “Let’s change the way it downloads”….so now I have an app that takes demonstrably longer to download, is unstable and inexplicably decides to remove the download you completed just yesterday. The layout resembles nothing like the newspaper, which I believe was part of the brand. To wrap this up….Bring back the legacy app. Please.
I love The Economist, but their app suffers from a number of issues: 1. Even after logging in with a paid subscription, the app demands that you subscribe via a pop-up at the bottom and a permanent link at the top. 2. It logs you out frequently and doesn’t readily accept your information when you log back in. 3. There are minor glitches. 4. There is no search function for articles and so it is an ordeal to go back beyond the current issue to find things of interest, which is extremely annoying and contrary to other media app common practices. 5. When clicking on The Economist articles in social media, it has to jump through Safari and then the app, which takes a few seconds, and sometimes you get stuck in Safari where it pretends you are not a subscriber and... demands that you subscribe before showing you the article that you have paid good money for. 6. The overall layout of the app is not extremely well designed, which requires a lot of clicking to get around and allows one to easily miss even current articles (much less historical articles, which are extremely difficult to find). Too much graphics and repetitive links and links that aren’t relevant and not enough smooth/ seamless connections to other current or historical articles.
It’s nice that you can one again select a word and look it up. Unfortunately you cannot expand the selection to more than one word. Also, with the smallest text size the last couple of words in a paragraph are sometimes missing. My wish list includes syncing saved articles and the check mark for articles you have read between devices. And some actions, like saving an article, are strangely sluggish. I often think I failed to tap the bookmark icon, only to discover that I have now tapped it twice and it is turned off again, A display of the most recent articles would also be nice. I sometimes use Apple News to get that. I don’t want to miss articles that were online but never made it into the print edition. I’d like a Daily Charts section in the digital weekly edition like the Economist Explains section, and extra articles in other areas, like we get for the Britain section in the U.S. The content remains great and I appreciate the addition of photo captions. Thanks.
I absolutely love the content; to the point, fact and data based journalism with a good dose of opinion from people across the political spectrum. The only reason holding me back from giving it a five star rating is the lack of features which are standard on other news apps. My top pain points: 1) not having the ability to highlight text in articles. (How many times do we highlight an interesting insight in the print magazine!) 2) the Save feature doesn’t sync across devices. It’d be great to save an article on my iPad and Web and later continue reading it on my iPhone 3) Make sharing interesting insights easier. Today I need to first copy and send the sentences I found interesting, and then share the link to the article separately. Can we please combine these two steps together, so that I can share a particular sentence and have the app-auto attach the link to the article as well? Not only will it be a better user experience, but it’ll accelerate the growth of the app. Great work to the team and thanks for considering the feedback!
Like many, I was very disappointed with the Economist dropping e-ink versions of the paper. I hate having to have another reason to spend way too much time staring at a screen. And for a person that is always traveling, the paper deliveries just pile up at home, not to mention they arrive the Tuesday after the new edition is out. But, that's not the annoying part. This app will not save your location in an article you're reading if you get interrupted and leave the app, no matter what settings you chose within the app. It will also annoying start in the Home screen that attempts to feed you articles that are new. I like the layout of the paper, I want to read the sections together... so I want to have the choice to start the app right where I left off, every time. Sure, I can also sit at my desk for many more hours in a week reading the "paper", but i can't stand having a flashing add distract me while I'm reading a paragraph. It would be lovely if the Economist provided a PDF style view of the paper in their app for tablets that has the exact layout as the physical paper, this would give it a much improved aesthetic.
I love reading and listening to the Economist. The app is easy to use and has steadily improved over the years. It is one of my top 3 apps. I listen or read it about 5 hours per week. At the heart over the great value is the best journalism. I have tried the WSJ, Barrons, and others; but only the Financial Times (which I also subscribe to) comes close to the Economist’s level of Investment, Political, and Management analysis. I have been a subscriber for over 25 years and it has mad a large impact on my career and my portfolio. They cover the key topics and have the highest levels of Journalism. I highly recommend it.
The weekly format is a feature, not an anachronism
The Economist still stands alone as far as I know when it comes to content and writing talent but I do wish the app would go back to enabling a read through the weekly editions. I have no doubt that driving users to the more frequently updated home page pushes up app opens and whatever other metrics some meddling product manager was trying to move but, it’s silly to make those of us that enjoy long form pieces and prefer to stay out of the 24 hour news cycle go through multiple clicks and a bunch of scrolling and head scratching to find where we left off in the article we were last reading. A “just show me the newspaper but on my phone” mode would be great.
I started reading The Economist 30 years ago. I have subscribed the entire time without interruption. It is the best conceived, written and edited newspaper in the English language. Most of those 30 years I carried the hard copy with me around the world, reading it cover to cover. With the app no need to even carry the hard copy. Though I must admit, with inserts removed and folded in half along long axis, it was quite convenient. Getting something new each day is a nice upgrade to the weekly version. In the hard copy days I would sometimes finish whole issue before next one arrived - Economist withdrawal. A nice, new, 15 minute taste every day paces me better
I’ve had a subscription for years now and whereas the new app is a slight improvement over the previous app, it still has a poor UI design, limited functionality, slow and buggy. I love the content, but the app is a big frustration point for me. 1. You cannot easily toggle between listen and read mode- some people like to do these alternatively or in conjunction. 2. Very often I find that the screen randomly freezes. 3. When I run a routine app update, it logs me out. 4. The „read in app“ functionality doesn’t work properly either. If I find myself on IG, where I follow the economist, and I want to read a spotlighted article, it doesn’t do a proper handover to reading in the app so there is just the portion of the article that you can read for free.
At first there was an app for each masthead, then there was a coalescing into a single one. Less to manage, easier to use. My only issue is that when using earbuds that connect directly to my iPhone, the start-stop switch on the earbuds does not stop the audio from playing. That forces me to the use either my Apple watch, or reach into my pocket for my phone (oh the shame of it all). It would also be a very nice feature if the backward and forward on the watch display instead of moving to the previous and next article would instead rewind and fast forward x and y seconds as proscribed by podcast skip button settings. Thanks.
I love the Economist content; it’s a shame the app and customer experience is so bad. The app UI is clunky and doesn’t sync across devices, so articles marked “read” on your iPhone don’t reflect on your iPad, for instance. But what prompted me to write this review was the irritating cancellation experience. I’m cancelling temporarily as I need to save some funds for a few months and I am asking for a new subscription as a gift from my family. To cancel, you have to call or contact via chat, and then they fight you on cancelling with aggressive upsell. Funny enough, it only takes a click to sign up! Price transparency and ease of managing subscription should be prioritized for paying customers, especially in the current economy. Surely if anyone understands the fiscal doom and gloom for consumers these days it should be the Economist!
1) To quote another review: “What’s really missing here is a seamless experience when switching between iPad, iPhone apps and Economist website. I often switch between devices (depending on where I am), but the ‘reading progress’ (respectively, the checkmarks for read articles) in the weekly edition only shows on one device. It would be great if that could be synced across all devices.” 2) I would really like the option to pick up where I left off and not have it default to the Home tab every time I open the app. Thanks for considering this.
I love the Economist and have been a subscriber for over ten years. The app is great for reading, and automatic audio download is awesome. It would be nice if they could add automatic switching between light and dark mode based on iPhone system settings. Other apps do this, so at sunset my phone switches to dark mode, and at sunrise back to light mode. Currently, in the Economist app you have to change it manually. Its audio playback & features leave something to be desired. From the Lock Screen, there are no 15-second skip forward & skip back buttons; only next track & previous track. Adding the skip forward buttons would be a great add and align it with other audio and podcast apps. It would be especially useful when I’m out on a walk with a mask on, because I could skip forward & back without unlocking the phone (FaceID doesn’t work with a mask on). Also, clicking the middle button on Apple’s wired earbuds doesn’t pause the audio...this is annoying because it works for other apps.
The Economist has great news content. Unfortunately, they treat their app like a complete afterthought and their non-print subscribers like second-class citizens. Every few months, it is updated, and inevitably, one cannot log in again until numerous calls, emails, and reinstalls are undertaken. It looks like they have now done away with email support so you can call a phone tree with all your abundant free time. For a magazine that charges a substantial subscription price, one would think they could spend a few bucks (or pounds) to hire a reputable app developer.
I get updates throughout the day on my phone about developments. I treasure more than anything the iconoclastic independent take on many issues.. it does not view issues from the cozy ease of center left or center right of many publications. The Economist informs me of key developments and tends from around the world and how they affect each other. I love the slightly sarcastic voice I detect at times. When I was teaching middle school, high school and college students I would use articles from The Economist to both inform students and to show the best use of the English language.
I access each week’s edition mostly through the audio version while jogging outdoors. I would like an easy way to download the audio version each week using WiFi, place at the end of the playlist, and start the playing later. So far the only way I have found to approximate this is to delete previous editions and then download the new one. Also, while listening, after another app interrupts, such as incoming phone call, the Economist does not automatically resume playing on the iPhone.
I’ve been reading the Economist for more than 40 years. I read it when I was conservative republican in my mid-thirties. I read it today in my seventies as a democrat. Despite the fact that my own views have shifted over time, I have always been able to depend on the Economist to give it to me straight—without the hyperbole, bias or the desire to shock, enrage or terrify that so many other news sources use to attract and retain reader/viewers. What a relief. I love being able to read The Economist without the need to activate the filters I use when reading or viewing other news sources.
The app is terrible. They just didn’t take the time to think through the basics of a reading app. Every time you close your phone and reopen, you need to manually start from the beginning, navigate to the issue you are reading, navigate back to the article you were reading, and then find the place in the article you left off. It absolutely drove me nuts when on a 10 hour flight where I was constantly back and forth between reading and kids. It’s a problem the rest of the time too. Nobody would use the Kindle app if it did this. Makes me wonder how this app got high ratings. Of course, the Economist is excellent content, but since this rating is for the app, I’m focusing on the app itself.
Overall this is a solid app. It’s reliable, and the interface is clean and intuitive. However, the option to play the audio versions of individual articles from the weekly publication does not yet exist in the app; it is available on the web version. I would like to see this feature implemented in the app. There is the option to listen to podcast shows of course, just not the articles from the magazine. The content itself is thoughtful and the dedication to puns and wordplay is incredible. I think we all know the OECD is “a club of mostly rich countries” by now, so it might do to spare the ink.
The quality of writing and editing in The Economist is quite high. Articles are informative and often with a little bit of wit to keep things entertaining. I’ve been a subscriber for about five years and will continue for the foreseeable future. The app is stable but has a few nagging issues that have been present for some time. If they push a new set of featured articles to the app whatever you are reading gets replaced. It’s as if articles are stored by index and you’re reading whatever is in position x rather than a particular article. It has also started duplicating paragraphs on occasion.
Essential reading and great app overall - audio issues
I love The Economist and recommend it highly to anyone interested in staying informed and learning about global issues. The app itself is overall very good. It’s sleek and easy to navigate. However, 4 stars because the new podcast section isn’t great. The player is very clunky - unresponsive controls, no queue, no episode notes, etc. For some reason you can’t tap an episode title to play it. The audio edition of the magazine (which I also love) suffers from the same UI issues. It seems to me that the audio component was an afterthought, which is a shame since the content is so good.
Our global coverage offers distinctive insight and incisive analysis. Start your 1-month free trial now.* Each week over 1.5m subscribers trust The Economist to help them make sense of the world and the news. Join them by downloading The Economist app. The app includes a daily selection of the best of our journalism, along with the full weekly version of The Economist newspaper to read or listen to on the go. Already a subscriber to The Economist? Simply install the app and sign in with your Economist login details. The Economist is an award-winning, trusted filter on global affairs, offering in-depth analysis of everything from business, finance and politics to science, technology and economics. It covers every region of the world including the United States, Britain, Europe, Asia and Latin America and it excels at big topics, from climate change and sustainability to the future of work and globalisation. The Economist is also available as a weekly magazine. App highlights: • Top stories: the latest news analysis combined with highlights from the weekly issue • Economist The World in Brief: a short morning briefing on the day’s global news • The Economist weekly edition: full access to the weekly version of The Economist newspaper • The audio version of the weekly edition to listen to on the go • A selection of our podcasts, including The Intelligence, a daily burst of illumination from The Economist’s worldwide network of correspondents App features: • A morning briefing on the day ahead • Timely analysis of the world’s biggest news stories, updated by the end of the day • The weekly edition available from 9 pm every Thursday evening London time • Audio versions of the weekly edition read by professional broadcasters • Reading times highlighted on each article • Bookmarks to save articles for later or create personal reading lists Subscribing in-app • Subscribe in-app and take advantage of our introductory subscription offer • Subscribe in-app and take advantage of our 7-day free trial • At the end of the trial, the subscription will automatically renew onto a monthly subscription at the standard price. Annual and quarterly subscriptions are also available in some regions • You will be charged in your local currency at the prevailing exchange rate as defined by Apple. Payment is charged to your iTunes account upon confirmation of purchase • All subscriptions automatically renew. Your account will be charges 24 hours before the renewal date, at a cost of £19.99/$19.99/€24.99 for a monthly subscription • Full terms of use can be found at https://www.economist.com/legal/terms-of-use • Our privacy policy can be found at https://www.economist.com/privacy
