The Economist - News, Podcasts 12+

The audio edition in app just seems to go from bad to worse! I remember years ago the audio would reliably download in the background and ACTUALLY work offline. Now even when audio is ‘downloaded’ it seems to require an internet connection to actually begin playback.

If the audio is or isn’t downloaded, getting it to play is actually a daily challenge in and off itself. It is beyond unreliable and has been for many many versions. I always install updates and I’m consistently disappointed. The most common thing is for the app to seemingly do nothing when I press play and then “Something went wrong, try again later” about 45 seconds later. This often requires a force quit to resolve. Usually 3 force quits before the audio actually works.

I don’t understand how it is seeming so difficult to implement a feature literally any other app which plays audio manages to do? That feature being actual playback. It’s so broken and I’m sorely let down by this. Support is quite useless at this & you always get the same coined response or ‘we regularly release updates’ blah blah blah. Quit “handling” people and just sort out the app.

When I first read the Economist magazine it was printed in black & white on plain paper. There were few pictures and mostly graphs.
I bought the magazine because there was a lot of interesting information for the few pennies I had. In all about two or three weeks of reading from just one edition. And the Economist covered North American news too. Good value for a teenager with little pocket money.
When a new teacher and American arrived at our school, I scored his early interest in me because he asked our class “what did candidate Kennedy offer farmers in the US, our class was unable to respond. But I knew that Kennedy offered to increase the subsidy for grain production and was able to reply to Mr Teagarden with an accurate reply from reading The Economist magazine. He was surprised that anyone - let alone a schoolboy - knew the answer. I enjoyed a helpful relation with this exchange teacher. (I also formed a determination to read the Economist ever since)
That was many decades in the past. I still read about a third of each edition every week even though I’m almost 80 years old and find that my memory is getting weaker and weaker. But I am that Dundo. Because that was what I was called by my classmates at school. Was Dundo

The biggest problem right now that it is draining the battery. The app is on the top of the apps list, using 20% of my battery power.
A general problem is that even if it has the function to download edititions, it is good for nothing. When I open it at the time I have no internet connection, it takes long minutes until it opens, because it tries to update. So what is the reason of downloading? Very annoyingly, if you try to read the downloaded edition while you are losing signal repeatedly, the app makes it impossible to read the articles. For example on the London tube: every time the phone connects to the station wifi, the app updates the article and jumps to the top of the text, so you need to scroll down again. But better not, because as soon as the wifi signal is lost, it jumps to the top again 😤. If you are not lucky, the pictures are not shown in the “downloaded” edition, because when it tries to update and the connection is lost, it seems the “downloaded” images don’t exist anymore. So again, what is the reason to download editions?! Why it can’t do it in the background? And how is it it can’t notice there is no connection? Why do I need to wait until it opens?
Other news apps are way better, like the New York Times, which doesn’t even offer offline reading, yet it works.
I’d expect more from a company like this.