CNN: Breaking US & World News Software

The app’s design and news coverage are great! However, it freezes and then crashes on my devices extremely often. This still happens, even though I’ve uninstalled and reinstalled the entire app multiple times. It’s particularly annoying when it makes it impossible to read certain articles or watch certain videos. As an iOS developer myself, I’d bet money that the ad service this app is using (or the way it’s integrated) is to blame. It seems like when certain ads are loading, they tie up the main thread, so that the UI stops getting updated. The developers could probably address this problem by reconfiguring the ads to load on a background thread. If that doesn’t solve it, they may need to switch to a different ad provider or service altogether. Once again, I’m very happy with the app’s design and news quality—just disappointed that the app crashes so frequently. It’s been this way for years, and I keep hoping it will improve, but so far I’ve been disappointed.

The app itself is done well. No bugs or glitches that I have come across. The two major complaints I have come from the articles themselves. Many stories are video only which I understand as it being a television network application. But not all of us have the ability to watch a video to get the news. It would be great if there was an actual article along with the video for those of us unable to view. I have found myself leave the app to go to another source to get the story due to not being able to watch the video. The second issue I have is with the “breaking news” alerts that pop up on my phone. I remember when breaking news was important information that needed to break into a regular broadcast to give viewers the information. The amount of breaking news is ridiculous as not everything is that important. Please get back to marking stories as breaking news when they are truly urgent/important and not every time an article gets posted.

It’s a great app. It delivers all the news of the cable news channel in a digestible format. It delivers rapid updates and clearly defines opinion pieces from news. It typical has less than a 30 second delay from major news networks for breaking events if you have alerts on and the alerts aren’t so cumbersome or numerous that they impolitely beg for dismissing the app. There are ads. I don’t find them overbearing in the least, but should you want to watch a quick clip you should be prepared for them. They aren’t required when simply reading articles, however they do appear between them. The only deterrent I find is hyperlinks within articles. Touching any of them moves you to a new page or opens your browser. This is atypical of all other apps and a bit counterintuitive to the UI as reading requires scrolling. This has only happened for the past few months and will most likely be soon corrected.