KOIN 6 News - Portland News

I used to enjoy using the KOIN 6 News app, but over the past few months the experience has gone downhill….. There are far too many ads. Every article seems to have ad after ad, and many of them automatically play videos and some are just PSA common sense. On top of that, you have to sit through a video ad before playing the video. The clickbait ads at the bottom of the article are silly but older people fall for it. One of the biggest issues is that I can’t listen to my own music or podcasts while browsing because the app constantly pauses my audio. Deleting the app, this is way too much ads to be reading daily news.

This app is such a mess. Ads pop up and the swipe up to dismiss is almost the same gesture as closing the app on iPhone, so 9 times out of 10 I accidentally close it. Video ads start running immediately so you can’t just read the article and see the picture related to the article (today it was a girl doing bridge pose instead of the suspect police are asking public to look for). Articles lack punctuation, spelling and capitalization errors are everywhere. It’s fine for just seeing the notification blurbs that come up, but don’t bother clicking them, it’s all downhill from there.

The prior version had a much better interface. It had more and better choices of articles and used space more efficiently. Sure, it was a little clunky, but now, there is so little information, and so much wasted space. I'd love to be a part of a testing, feedback, or focus group for future releases.