BBC: World News & Stories

Bad user experience now. Popups like “login” or adds detract from reading news. Some articles impose a new scroll dynamic, where there is higher resistance/dampening and the scroll slows down to a halt much faster. If all of iOS scrolls at the same speed, we get used to it. This app should not feel like it has the right to scroll differently. All of these add to experiences that make you realize you don’t like the app instead of integrating the user seamlessly to the app’s content. I’ve tried it again after uninstalling it a year ago after the layout changes, popups, and scrolling irked me and it’s still the same. Be predictable and let us interface with your content. Stop imposing your own way to use our devices that’s different from the other 99% of the time we use our devices. You used to be able to open the app, tap a news article, swipe left or right to go to different articles, and be done. Now it’s open app, decline to log in, pick an article, close the ad, wait for the page to shift around as a webpage is opened within the app and styling changes, now you can scroll, now you recognize it scrolls weird…and now I’m ranting. This used to be my only news app and now have to move to others, and I still haven’t found a better one than what this was a few years ago. :(

The app updated about a month ago to the new “modernized” format, and since then I have spent significantly less time on the app because of how poorly designed it has become. I’m not against changing the app if it would result in improvements to the user experience. However, I don’t believe that is the case. Issues I have with the current version are as follows: -The “My News” section no long appears, and none of the five tabs (“Top News”, “Topics”, “Popular”, “Videos”, “Live”) replace that functionality, making finding news in specific categories (e.g. “Gaming,” which used to have its own category) frustrating. -No way to set the topics of the topics tab, as far as I’m aware. -No search functionality, as far as I can tell after about a month. -The popular tab lists the top 10 most read articles, and it used to label them 1-10, now it does not, even though there is still always exactly 10. -Popular tab has the articles spaced much wider, only allowing me to view about half of them on one screen. -Popular tab used to display the category of the news article along with the time since last update, now it only displays the time. The only improvements to the app after the update are the addition of the “time to read” metric at the top of each article, and the fact that the overall look of the articles didn’t change too severely.

This app focuses mostly on the distressing news throughout the world. It repeats it ad nauseum. There is so much news out there, it would be good for this app to broaden its horizons. It gives a bit of news from the most "noisy" places (repeatedly), but fails miserably in wider coverage. If it's not bad news, this app doesn't cover it. Except of course for the little Royals. Now that's cute. The main problem that I have with it is that if you want to read one of the stories and you happen to be way down in the column on the story, when you finish reading it and go back to the column it puts you all the way back up to the top of the column instead of where you were. That is extremely frustrating have to go all the way back down to the bottom of the column where you were!!!