BBC News - UK & World Stories

I have had to downgrade this latest version 7.0.0 It’s really not doing it for me, I preferred the old version where you had swipe right to different topics, this scrolling one is terrible, and doesn’t seem to show as many topics, and fresh news is less than it was, The only thing I find I want to scroll is back to the previous Version, still I suppose these app developers have to keep themselves looking busy 2 / 5 and that’s being generous. Update: Further downgrade to 1 Star, seems the app has a Share function, so you can share news on Facebook etc… but it doesn’t actually work, you press Share, and select Facebook, it appears to perform a curtsy and that’s it, so it is awkward to use and lacks functionality, don’t know why they did this, the previous version was much better. Pointless Updated Update, well the latest version seems to have fixed the curtsy and I can now share news as a post on Facebook, but sadly the layout is still not improving any, but back up to 2 Stars, I wish they’d go back to the previous sideways scroll, I really can’t find any interest in the vertical scroll.

The main features (Top Stories and Popular) work reasonably well. The app is generally fast and not too buggy, although there are 2 major annoyances for me. Firstly, the search function doesn’t ever seem to work for me. It never returns search results. Sometimes I want to find an article I’ve previously read or e.g. search for the weekly news quiz. This feature would be very convenient for that purpose. However, since it doesn’t work, I have to either manually trawl through articles in the app or run a Google search for the article I’m after. This makes the whole feature redundant. If this worked, it would massively improve my user experience so it is frustrating that it doesn’t. Secondly, the top 10 popular articles often have the article names and associated images scrambled (so that the wrong images are attached to the wrong headlines). This is a fairly minor issue, but it is sometimes confusing and sometimes jarring when a serious headline is mapped to a comical image or vice versa.

Sorry but the previous version was better than this latest revision. Now there is so much news available but not properly categorised or is out of date, you can be forgiven to miss something important. It also wastes time - reviewing old items that certainly should not appear on “My News”. It may have a categorised place though.... How about a category for “old news” or “ Updates” To help with all of this, it would be good if at the end of each item, both in picture format or detailed text, you add the date and time the item was first broadcast. You can also add an update date / time, but keep you first broadcast date / time as well. The date / time of your informative news incidents is important to everyone so this is a very worthy consideration. Thank you for reading and considering this.