Patch - Everything Local

Patch is a great source for local news briefs. They cover things that I cannot find in my local news paper or cable news network. At one time there was the option to comment on articles. Unfortunately it became depressingly negative. So much so that it became a huge turn off. Unlike some others here, I am thrilled that feature has been removed. For those of you that are bothered by this then maybe Patch isn’t for you. In fact I suspect those that are complaining about are the some ones with the negative and overly political things to say.

I’ve really appreciated having this app. I come from a large family that’s spread out so it’s nice to know what’s going on in the communities where my siblings and parents live. I’ve also moved around a bunch and it’s been nice to keep tabs on the local news of where I used to live. The reason I gave it 4 stars is because a few weeks ago it started getting glitchy and wasn’t loading new articles and the few articles I booked marked disappeared. I had to uninstall and reinstall it to get it working. iOS recently did an update so that could have been why but I was still disappointed I lost the articles I had saved. Update: it’s glitchy again, not giving me updated local information and deleting my bookmarks. This is the second time in just a couple of months it’s doing this. If this is happening because of updates on my phone then I will have to delete and reinstall it every time.... that’s really frustrating. I love what this app provides but extremely disappointed in how its operating.

I signed up for Patch emails for local news updates in the small town I live in. Those emails were clickbaity (open the email, read a teaser, click on “read more,” and get taken to a collection of articles where I have to click yet again on the one I want to read). Taking a reader through that many clicks made it seem like that’s all they were after. So I downloaded the app and went through the town selection, opted in for alerts, clicked “let’s get started,” etc. to finally read some local news. The next time I got an alert from the app, Patch made me go through the entire town selection/set up alerts/click click click process as if I had never set it up before. And this is after clicking on an alert *that the app sent me*. Next day it did the same thing. After a few days of this I deleted it.