The Economist Erfahrungen und Bewertung

Jetzt gibt es anscheinend zwei App für eine Zeitschrift. Bei der hier sind weniger bugs als in der anderen, die gerne mal abstürzt oder lange lädt. Dafür fehlt hier die Audio Edition. Irgendwie ist das alles nichts. Bei so einer tollen Zeitung müsste TheEconomist doch wirklich besser sein können.

Ich benutze TheEconomist sehr gerne. Abzug leider wegen gelegentlichen Abstürzen, die schon viele Monate auftreten ohne behoben zu werden

Die Applikation ist insgesamt sehr gelungen. Bedauerlicherweise wurde aber die sehr nützliche Funktion, für die Audiobeiträge Playlisten anlegen zu können, bei der Modernisierung gespart. Daher bleibe ich dabei, die Legacy App zu nutzen

TheEconomist funktioniert nur, wenn man eine gute Internetverbindung hat. Das nervt wahnsinnig. Dazu kommt, dass die "heruntergeladenen" Audioversionen der Artikel nicht verfügbar sind wenn man kein Internet hat. Warum soll ich die dann überhaupt herunterladen? Extrem ätzend.

Bin immer top informiert und auf dem neuesten Stand und lerne über die Geschehnisse weltweit

Es ist sehr gut.

I purchased a subscription via the App and received a receipt and invoice from Apple. However, I never received Login details. I contacted the Economist and they said this problem has to be solved by Apple („ because you got the App from their App Store“). The Economist could not even check whether my email is in their system.

Of course, Apple could not help either because they did not programm the App. Apple reimbursed the money for the subsciption.

The Economist is really a great magazine. The App and their customer service are not of the same quality.

Unübersichtlich

Für mich Grund auf ein Papierabo umzustellen

TheEconomist ist unübersichtlich und wenig nutzerfreundlich. Vermisste eine klare inhaltliche Struktur.

The app has some obvious bugs that should be fixed. Its UI is quite counter-intuitive and should offer a few more options.

1. I usually read or listen to the weekly edition. When opening the app I should be able to return to the last article, instead of being pushed to the daily section.

2. I switch between reading and listening often. The last article should have an option to move in tandem.

3. There are bugs with audio playback all the time, even when downloaded. Stopping, not resuming, starting the next weeks issue when I want to resume listening to the current article etc.

4. The ads are intrusive. I doubled my payment to The Economist by moving from the Kindle to the App edition and in return I get audio, which is great, and ads, which are annoying. The ads should be removed and the price increased. Alternatively, at least change the UI so that scrolling on a small phone screen actually leads to scrolling and not to accidentally opening ads all the time.

Hope this helps to improve!

The app is good, is stable, light and works smoothly most of the times. However, the app could benefit of some features that would easily turn it into a 5 star. For example, the ability to synchronize between devices the last status (where I left reading) and the bookmarks. Also, more contextual info could be available through links to other artifacts (articles, dictionary, etc) or even external content. The app should offer more
control about the content (current and old) and the account (for example, the ability to change region).

I would enjoy if the audio function would save audio files in the order as I select them. It currently does so the other way around. The last article I want to hear appears first in the list and if I start with the end of the list to hear the article I first selected (and whom I most want to listen to) the audio streaming stops when the last title is finished. Afterwards I need to manually select the next title. This is a bit complicated especially when you are listening to the economist while running or in the go.

Three years later, this comment is unfortunately still true: Over the years, I have lost marked articles many times in updates of this mediocre app. Ripping pages out of the magazine is more reliable and I have gone back to doing that for material I want to keep. The Economist has great content and I love to read it. But the app still has immense room for improvement. I have subscribed to the Economist for two or three decades and am disappointed at this obvious failure to go digital in a competent and engaging manner. Please read this comment and do something!

Fantastic magazine and marcelous app. Just recently began using the audio edition more and more. Using it I noticed that only the first heard article from each section is ticked of when finished with a red tick.

Would be great if this would occur for every article fully played or is it a bug at my end?

For some time I am asked to try this app whithin the legacy app, so I gave it another try. Sadly this is still a very poor successor. Very annoying is the fact that the app delivers a different regional edition from my print and legacy app and I did not find any ways ro set the preference. Another major problem (already many times critizised in comments here) is the limited use without internet access. Internet Access is not only a problem for the few readers on airplanes but permanently affects many users behind various firewalls (including the great firewall).
This makes the App unusable. I hope the legacy app will stay online until there is a better alternative.

The journalism is amazing but the app is frustrating. I have the following issues. 1) My iPhone runs very hot when using the app. Displaying text should not be that demanding. I am running an iPhone XS. 2) When using the audio playback, the app regularly terminates, then I have to restart it, and finally I cannot listen to the specific piece of content because the app cannot start the audio replay again. 3) The audio download is slow, the phone is hot, the app terminated multiple times per edition that I try to download. This is frustrating. 4) The app terminates out of the blue.

I would really hope that the decs fix this soon. It’s a pity because I adore the economist as a newspaper!

The content of the app is terrific, as you would expect from the Economist. Among other benefits, it's great to be able to hear the stories read by readers who evidently understand the content and know how to pronounce the foreign words and names. The app does a generally good job of making the content conveniently available. I deducted 1 star because the app sometimes shows hard-to-understand and/or unpredictable behaviour in connection with the playing of audio.

Overall, a quite impressive app as it mostly manages to combine the daily and weekly reporting of The Economist - and the audio versions - under one electronic roof.

However, there are still a few bugs lurking here and there. For instance, displaying articles (and yes, I am a subscriber) on my iPad in landscape mode, the right ends of several lines get truncated (1-2 letters missing), resulting in poor readability.
This should be fixed soon.

Compared to the previous app the location of last reading is not remembered. That leads to a lot of searching and clicking when reopening the app…
Additionally, it would be nice to indicate if an article has already been read. The reason is that some articles are now available earlier than the whole magazine issue. An indicator could avoid confusion and wasted time.
Please improve the user friendliness of the app.

Dear Economist,

I’ve been an avid reader for over 15 years and one of your biggest fans.

The latest updates to the App in the last weeks are fantastic and the usability has increased.

One big issue remains : when you start reading an article and continue later (without bookmarking it), the last article and position are not auto-saved anymore.

For some reason with the lastest major update this feature was removed and is very annoying because you have to open the weekly edition, find the article and then find the last position. This wastes time and takes away the fun part of reading the digital magazine.

Please fix this!

Thank you
Anthony

State of the art complement to the magazine, just as you would expect. I especially like that they listen to feedback from their subscribers. I requested that it should be possible to select text, mainly so that I can use Apple’s “look up” function for words I don’t understand. In the next update they had included that function - thank YOU!

I really enjoy the economist app. Yet they could improve the audio version. Sometimes I download it but I still require an inter connection to listen to it. Also the button to scroll through sections is inconveniently places on the „remove audio“ button

It seems that using other apps while listening to the audio edition leads to sudden stops of the playback. Even in apps that have no audio function themselves or one which is run on startup.
Switching into the Economist app, the App is refreshing (which is not working riding the Berlin U-Bahn or being on the plane) and one has to go the the tab of the current edition, wait for the loading to finish and then start playback once more. As this is one of many issues in a series, I suspect that the Economist app team has some serious QA issue.

Payed for yearly subscription via iPad, didn’t get login credentials for the website, restore purchases on iPhone doesn’t work. One customer service rep claimed website is not included, another claimed its apples fault, a third one suggested that I should buy a second subscription via the website. No ownership, no solutions offered so far. Really disappointed as the magazine and its content is amazing. Could imagine becoming a lifetime subscriber. But not this way. If the issue is not resolved soon I will ask apple for a refund.

Great content and app.
There is a bug for some time now that I wish it would get fixed. With the iPad Pro 11 it is not possible to scroll or navigate the app while you are listening to an article. This is possible with my iPhone though.

It would make the app perfect for me if you could fix this. Thank you in advance!

The integration of the espresso app and the magazine app is a huge improvement over the previous „the economist app landscape“. Now you get all of the content in one place and navigation through different articles is a lot easier.

Pretty disappointing to having to uninstall and then reinstall the app for getting the audio version working. The app has yet to be developed to fully deliver all its claims to... :-/

I love reading my Economist via the app. As a subscriber to the European edition, my only complaint is that it seems the app can only show the US edition with the US section in front an Europe last. Please allow for selecting editions so I can have the sections in the same order in the app as it is in my printed version. Thx.

First: Great content, thanks for that!
Second:
- Please integrate a function to highlight text and automatically bookmark such articles in the iPhone and iPad-Apps.
- The support of iOS-shortcuts to start listening to the Espresso or the weeks issue would also be a very useful addition.

1. Easy to use online all features including text & audio download
2. Works flawlessly in offline mode to listen to audio and/or read articles
3. Easy to navigate to back issues to revisit article

Improvement Suggestions
1. Have KALS cartoon as a resizable image fit to screen portrait or landscape. Because it is B&W I guess it could be quite small <1MB png and still look good.
2. Promo Links to upcoming Economist Events

I really enjoy reading articles using The Economist app. The layout of articles is great, the focus on the current edition is good, and finally it presents its content in a pleasant way.

The two things I would like to see for an even better experience are

- an automatically hiding titlebar when reading an article (it should get out of the way when scrolling down) and
- more granular font size options (the jumps are too big for my taste and might benefit from a slider UI).

The app works as advertised, but it is lacking the ability to download full editions (including images, tables, graphs) to read offline.

Finally the various audio issues seem to have been fixed. Otherwise the app remains a very good digital platform for the outstanding Economist content.