iPhone does not have decent offline news reading apps

AP Mobile News

This is the app that was advertised with great fanfare in Apple keynote when iPhone first came out. It is affiliated with the American news agency Associated Press. You would be able to submit your own news and what not. Well, there does not seem to be submission part, but there is news reading part.

AP Mobile News is not too bad to start with. When you launch the app, you see the list of top news.

I have the “US News” category selected here, but the view would be the same if I also was on “Top News” or any other one, just the news are different.

If you click through to any of the news, you get the news content.

Pretty straightforward stuff. And it even works when offline… well, sort of.

There are two big problems that separate the AP Mobile News from being a good news reader app.

Problem #1: the news list in the above format can get fairly long. And let’s say you have scrolled three screens down and found a news item that interests you. You click through, read it, and then click back on the category title, to get back to the list. Now, though, the list has scrolled back to the top: it does not remember your scroll position. So, if you were three screens down, you must scroll down again, to pick up from where you left off. And that is kind of annoying.

Problem #2 is about downloading and caching the news for offline use. The app seems to work so that only the news for the category which you are looking at are downloaded. So if I look at Top News when I am walking towards the subway station, and then enter the subway and lose coverage, I can read all the articles in Top News. Which is great. But if I want to go to other categories, well, it has not refreshed them.

In order to get all categories refreshed, I must individually “click through” all of them. You can see that in the bottom bar there are 4 main categories: “Top News”, “Local”, “Sports” and “Showbiz”. And if you tap “More”, you get even more categories:

So, to get all of them refreshed, I must tap around 20 times (first on category title, and then on “More” or “Back” to get back to the category list). This is somewhat unfriendly, but the app is actually somewhat usable if you only read top news in a few categories so you wouldn’t be affected by either problem.

NY Times

I thought I’ll give the competition a run, but it seems to be worse. The news list and category list views are actually very similar.

They also work the same way, i.e only categories that you “click through” to, are updated.

Where it really falls apart, though, is the single news item. When you click through to it, you see this.

See the text in the middle? I need to go online to read the full article. Completely useless. And yet they still have the audacity to show me the ads. Congratulations Westin Hotels & Resorts, for being featured in a dysfunctional app.

So, if you want to read full news articles on subway, AP Mobile News is not great but sort of works, but NY Times is completely useless.

Settings

One last test I did was to see if maybe there is something related to updating in the apps’ Settings screens. Here they are.

Well, that’s pretty useless. Nothing about updating. And I don’t understand what’s with the “keep news for” setting. Why would I want to have less than the maximum, ever? Because then it takes say 2 MB instead of 1 MB of storage, in my iPhone’s 16 GIGABYTES??? Storage space is clearly not a problem. And as for the risk of having someone read old news, well… if you look at the article list views above, I think it’s quite obvious in both what day’s news you are reading. I like the AP Mobile approach more where it very explicitly says the date for each item.

How would I fix these apps?

If I was doing the interaction design for such an app, here’s how I would do it.

Ideally, there would be no user interaction needed for downloading the new items: the apps would just constantly keep their content up-to-date in the background, since I can see no reason for NOT having always the freshest news. And whenever you open the app, you see fresh news that you can read offline in all categories.

Sadly, this can’t be done since you cannot have apps running in the background on the iPhone. There is, though, the “ping from Apple server to app when new content arrives on server” thing, that might be utilized for this. I don’t know enough about it technically to judge how feasible this would be.

The next best approach would be to have a gigantic “Update All” function in the app that does exactly what it says. Either have the app do “Update All” upon launch (better) or do it when the user taps a button (a bit worse, but might be necessary when, say, it is too demanding on the network or OS resources to do an automatic update every time).

Next: back to RSS?

I came across this post talking about Byline when preparing this post. Byline sounds like a good RSS reader that syncs with my Google Reader account, works nicely offline and generally satisfies my news reading needs. Who knows — if the AP Mobile News and NYTimes apps continue to annoy me, I might bite the bullet and pay its current $4.99 price and see if it can live up to its promises, and would let me allow to do fully offline RSS reading with two-way syncing.