Review of The Guardian's new iPhone app
The Guardian launched a new subscription-based app this morning. What's it like, and is it worth the money? Karen Lewis of MadeByPi reviews it for The Drum
The pricing model they have opted for is £2.99 for 6 months or £3.99 for 12 months. Although customers who had already purchased the old Guardian app will probably moan- App Store reviews bring out the worst in people! - this seems like exceptionally good value. It is also a good strategic move giving them recurring revenue to continue improving the app and providing dedicated content.
So, having downloaded, what we expected was an 'evolved' version that boasts more than they currently offer with added features, bells and whistles. On first impressions, it looks quite similar to the original app - which is no bad thing. The app itself is well presented and makes good use of strong colour-coded sections and simple navigation, so usability has been a key driver. Again a good thing.
Despite a few minor design blips (perhaps us being a bit picky but. ill-considered and slightly ugly 'favourites' pop-up and formatting and layout of 'post to twitter' feature) it is generally clean and elegant, sensibly not straying far from Apple's guidelines.
The app boasts some strong new additions including article comments, video content and live football goal alerts. Video content is highlighted in the new multimedia carousel and streamed quickly. That said, the quality was a bit lower than I'd have liked on Wi-Fi.
Football goal alerts is a great feature, so good in fact, I'm surprised it's not included in the Sky Sports Football app. Looking forward to putting it to the real test during tonight's match!
Offline reading is a very valuable feature which can make a long journey far more enjoyable. However, I doubt many users will get the most out of it as it's quite a cumbersome process with users having to manually set the download within their settings while they still have Internet - each and every single time you want to use it. Ideally this would automatically happen in the background while the app is running, first downloading the most relevant articles based on user's browsing behaviour or using their category choices. Let's see what an updated release brings on that front.
Overall, the Guardian app is very affordable and is well thought-out, it's an attractive rather than off-putting price point. Guardian have put themselves in a position where they can invest to continually improve this app to make it the best app in the news category - and in my opinion it currently stands as THE best news app in the market. Looking forward to see how it performs in the charts - but also influences other news apps in future.