The New York Times Reviews

As content, the NYT can’t be beat. But this latest “resdesign” of TheNewYorkTimes is bad enough to make me write a review for the first time. In a word it is over-designed. When scrolling through the main page, it will suddenly “readjust”, meaning an ad has loaded somewhere in the feed and you have lost your place as it races upwards for you to view it. Once is bad but this happens a couple of times in a single scroll.

When you read an article, the new design has changed the place of the back arrow for part of the navigation but is not the same throughout. I don’t like playing guess where the arrowis. But the biggest and reoccurring issue is the Sections page. What used to be a clear list of sections has now been buried under blocks of articles the NYT wants to spotlight for whatever reason. If I scrolled past it the first time, I don’t need to scroll past it again. I’m here to find a particular section, I know what I want.

Finally, the NYT really, really needs to work on the accuracy of their search function. It is ludicrous that I can’t find an article from 3 days ago using specific keywords. For such great content, it’s criminal to make it disappear. Please do better, NYT!!!

The NYT is full of great and varied content, so this review is not about the content, just TheNewYorkTimes . They’ve made a few updates to the UI in the past few months, each making TheNewYorkTimes less intuitive. I used to view my history or saved articles a lot when I didn’t have time to finish reading a good story. This used to be easily accessible in a side menu. Now it’s way more hidden, and I have to click a bunch of times to get to it. I can never remember where it is.
Also, the back button is now on the bottom of the screen for most articles, except when you view certain articles like through wire cutter. Everytime I want to click back at the top of the screen (where the back button is located on nearly every UI), it’s not there. Sometimes there is a back button at the top of the screen when you click on a link through the article. I clicked on this to bring me back to the article, but instead it took me to the front page. And then I couldn’t find the article that I was just reading. Frustrating!

These are just examples and sound like small, nit-picky things, but when you are constantly trying to figure out where to click, it adds time and makes TheNewYorkTimes annoying to use. I wish the UI developers prioritized common sense changes rather than just making TheNewYorkTimes “prettier.”

I use a VPN (a mainstream, widely available one) and many apps/sites don’t load properly. NYT’s app is odd because it works occasionally, but not usually—I don’t know if this is because of the VPN or if TheNewYorkTimes is just bad (but it seems to have a bunch of positive reviews so maybe it’s just me?). When I click on a push notification, it opens TheNewYorkTimes but only goes to the last article that was open, even if it was several weeks ago. Not useful. Then, if I search for the story, it only sometimes loads. I usually end up just using the website or relying on the morning briefing newsletter (so why am I paying for a subscription??). Another annoying aspect of TheNewYorkTimes is that you can’t zoom in on photos—I find myself doing this a lot on the website because there are interesting things to see and the phone screen is so small; it’s always a frustrating surprise when I try to zoom on TheNewYorkTimes and nothing happens. Aside from those specific issues, I also find it a little confusing/unintuitive how to find specific stories. Maybe I should be able to answer some questions about what interests me, and then it curates my home page based on my self-reported likes and my past views/reads. I could then use the “sections” page as a backup. Obviously NYT is the gold standard of journalism, but I’m surprised and irritated every time I remember how bad their app is. TheNewYorkTimes does look nice—I guess that’s worth +1 star.

I use TheNewYorkTimes...hourly. Multiple times per hour. I hope that will change soon, post election. But that is just to say: I am a heavy user of TheNewYorkTimes and love it except that recently something odd is happening that seem related to the ads. I’ll be scrolling up and down, reading an article with finger on scroll position and then suddenly the entire page will shift beneath me. It’s like the content of the ads off screen are expanding or contracting while I’m trying to read, and it shifts what I’m looking at up or down so I have to chase it and find where I was. I can’t say exactly when this started but it wasn’t a year ago. Maybe wasn’t six months ago but time doesn’t really make sense anymore. Three months feels like 15. So anyway keep up the great work with the news reporting and TheNewYorkTimes design but take a look at the way ads are adjusting content and negatively impacting the user experience. And thank you for everything you do, REAL NEWS.

TheNewYorkTimes loaded my phone with so much adware and tracking software that my phone would frequently crash and lag. I was confused about why my phone had gotten so much slower and less stable and then I realized theses problems only surfaced after I had downloaded the NYT app. I deleted TheNewYorkTimes and bookmarked NYT’s mobile site to my home screen instead and now the problems are gone. NYT is pulling some really shady dat collection and advertising tricks with TheNewYorkTimes, and the UI is terrible to boot.

TheNewYorkTimes also has a bug that makes it very easy to accidentally click on ads. This is annoying because it minimizes the article I’m reading and redirects me to the webpage of whatever company’s ad I just accidentally clicked on. I really hope this is just a bug, and that the developer will fix it, but I can’t help but think that this “bug” positively influences the developer’s revenue for ad’s that are paid for on a pay per click basis, and that at best this means they have no incentive to lose money by fixing it, and at worst they are aware of it and using it to fraudulently extract extra revenue from their advertisers.

Overall, I’m very disappointed with the experience TheNewYorkTimes provides. The quality of NYT’s content is well worth the $1/week subscription cost, but it isn’t worth all of the problems TheNewYorkTimes causes and the personal data/privacy concerns that come with TheNewYorkTimes are worrying to say the least.

I love the NYT, so this mediocre rating is simply due to the usability/customizability of TheNewYorkTimes . There is no night mode, which just feels a little behind the times in terms of the various display options that have now become standard in most phone & tablet apps.

I also personally wish there was slightly more customizability in terms of being able to block or hide certain categories of articles from appearing. For example, although we can choose what subjects we are interested in, which will then show up in the “For You” section, I would also love the option of telling TheNewYorkTimes what NOT to show me when scrolling through the main feed. For me specifically, I don’t like reading Opinion pieces and will never open them, so it’d be great for me in terms of usability if I could just have TheNewYorkTimes “hide” those when I’m scrolling through (or hide the entire Opinion section). Other people may never read the Entertainment section, or the sports section, etc., so perhaps they’d like to be able to scroll through the main “Today” section without seeing those. It would just be a nice, extra option that could continue to help shape the content to what each reader enjoys the most.

UPDATE: I tried TheNewYorkTimes again, thinking maybe i was being too harsh. Nope, the advertisements are actually worse now. meaning, there are more ads now then there were when i wrote the below review. I actually showed this to a friend who was amazed this is a paid subscription. The same animated ad is inserted between every 3 paragraphs. Honestly, I would pay MORE if the ads would just go away altogether as they completely take-away from the reading experience. Just charge me more so I can read the news in peace please.

Original Review: As mentioned by many others, the content is the best in the world. Unfortunately it is served alongside insidious ad tracking that follows one from the web and into TheNewYorkTimes . Expect to see the same ad inserted between every 3rd paragraph, over and over and over. I hope you liked that book you searched for online because you will see ads for it all day using TheNewYorkTimes. Creepy, and unnecessary for a newspaper, especially one that writes article against "super cookies and advertising platforms". This is a paid subscription, not a free product. I expect no ads, or at the very least, less of them.

I'm keeping my subscription to the best newspaper in the world, but i'm deleting TheNewYorkTimes and will read online, where I can block the ads and receive a much better reading experience, which of course is the point.

Still waiting for return of your “Find” in article feature. Not sure why you removed it. Is it not possible to add a feature allowing your readers to search within an article?

Imagine reading an article that references numerous names of key individuals, typically clarified early in an article by providing their full names and their context to the story. Maybe I’m not like most people in that I don’t memorize all that info up front. As the story reads on somewhere paragraphs below one of the earlier named persons is referenced by last name only. And I think, “who is this person? Oh crap no search or find feature in TheNewYorkTimes .” Now I have to scroll back up the article, losing my reading place, scanning for the name to recall who the person is so I can better understand the context.

What a disappointment? How can we live in a digital news world and have news apps that do not provide to their readers one of the very first features we all found useful in the early days of the web, “search”. Come now? No excuse I think. Make our lives easier. Is there no “design thinking” inherent in your designs? Of no search maybe offer hypertext links to key names, words that pop up with the important context. That’d be awesome! Of course, I suspect that’s more complicated to implement than simple in-article search.

Look, it’s The NY Times so the articles are generally thoughtful, abundant, and well written.

TheNewYorkTimes , on the other hand, is just a spinning wheel half the time I open it. It needs to be redesigned with the size of the payload in mind. The today tab has become bloated with too much content which takes ages to fully load. TheNewYorkTimes seems like it tries to lazy load sections to account for this but given all the rich content (photos, videos, ads) and the short lifespan of that content it still takes a long to render the whole tab and the order in which things load seems arbitrary. On top of that, the containers can’t predict the height of the content which hasn’t yet loaded meaning the page height jumps around as content shows up. The information architecture either needs to be redesigned and broken into more more discrete sections to reduce the page size or TheNewYorkTimes needs to change the way it fetches content (e.g. using fixed height containers, making separate calls for semantic and media content to speed up perceived load time). This would probably have the second order effect of improving ad performance since the ads frequently fail to render by the time I’ve give up on TheNewYorkTimes loading.

If you’re younger than 40, you can skip this review. I check the New York Times news feed on TheNewYorkTimes , or on my computer web browser at least once a day. It goes without saying that the New York Times reporters and staff do a great job reporting the news (well, great job most of the time). But a huge missing feature is the ability to view today’s paper in the format of the printed edition, similar to other American city newspapers Apps. I don’t always want the latest news, sometimes I just want to read today’s paper, and I want to view it in the format of the printed edition. Yes, TheNewYorkTimes does have a section titled today’s paper, and you can scroll through all the articles, and that format is perfectly fine for people that wish to view it in that format, but for goodness sake, on the weekend I really just like sipping my coffee and looking at the paper, in the old fashion format, even if it is on my iPad screen. Yes, I tried actual weekend home delivery, but where I live home delivery was pretty horrible so we stopped that. p.s. Good luck trying to find a location in TheNewYorkTimes that allows you to actually provide them feedback like this.

I have used TheNewYorkTimes for more than a decade. I haven’t always liked the layout, but I work around it to get to my favorites. The recent version has “Today’s news” and “Section” at the bottom that helps navigate. There is a huge amount of material available everyday, so navigating is crucial. Recently the news summary has disappeared from the top of the screen. I am sorry to see it go. My greatest complaint is that the current app is extremely dependent on a high quality WiFi connection. Previously I could download the day’s news, get on a plane or train, and go to airplane mode but still read the paper. No more! While I read TheNewYorkTimes is constantly updating. The text jiggles as it adds a photo or alters text. There are times it gets caught in a loop and the jiggle produces a blur of movement. So I have to close TheNewYorkTimes and start again. Some years ago the developers had allowed an old version to continue but eventually force the switch to the new app. I wish I could go back to that previous version as it was stable even when there were issues with the internet.

I love NYTimes’ content. I start and end my day with it. I’m proud to pay to support independent, critical coverage in journalism. However, you really need to try out your app in real life. I build mobile apps for a living and would get fired if I prioritized ads in my product over usability. It’s not that TheNewYorkTimes doesn’t work, but the inmates (ads) are running the asylum here. It’s impossible to scroll and peruse content while the screen updates, shifts, and goes blank to comically load content. You don’t even cache the ads between reading an article and going back to the front page view because they load all over again. I seriously laughed when I read some other reviews and they called it pinballing, and that they got seasick while using TheNewYorkTimes. So true!
I get it, making an app is hard, especially with competing demands for the business and new features. And that your team are humans, work hard and care. But really, this has gone too far. You need to take a step back, start listening to your users and take real steps to make TheNewYorkTimes work for its primary usecase - reading the frickin’ news! And add dark mode already, it’s called a stylesheet!

NYT recently updated its navigation. This design update has ripped away a huge amount of joy from my reading NYT reading experience on the iPad—I now spend more time guessing where my back navigation is going to be than reading. Now, before folks peg me as an anti-design evolution user, I will say that it’s great that NYT is trying to evolve the design to make the reading experience better. This incremental (…er…I’m HOPING this is just incremental) design update has created an inconsistency in TheNewYorkTimes experience though that makes using it extremely cumbersome. Article pages now have a back button at the bottom, while section landing pages (e.g. Business, New York, etc.) still have the back button at the top of the page. Some IA may have convinced designers that this will help users to understand where they are in TheNewYorkTimes architecture, but it really doesn’t matter. Readers just want to go back. I really don’t care where you put the back button at this point. My only request is that you put it in the same, consistent location everywhere. I’m spending more time navigating the site now than reading the articles.

TheNewYorkTimes is slow to load pages and slow to scroll through pages. Advertisements always load first, and their fancy animations sometimes seem to bog my device down, preventing the rest of the page from loading. My device is a little older, but not so old that it is out of date. It is plenty speedy when using other apps. If the device is a problem, TheNewYorkTimes should compensate by loading simpler pages and a simpler interface. TheNewYorkTimes is complex. It is hard to find some articles and sections. It used to be easier to navigate, but an update made it less user-friendly. My theory is that the engineers who work on TheNewYorkTimes have gotten out of control, and are adding all the fancy bells and whistles they can, unconstrained by anyone who advocates for ease of use and speed. This used to be a great app, but it has been gradually going downhill for a while now, for the reasons noted above. The content is great, and I subscribe to the NYT to read their newspaper, but the decline of TheNewYorkTimes is pushing me more and more to read in a browser on a computer, rather than via TheNewYorkTimes .

Update: today, all I see is a spinning activity widget. TheNewYorkTimes does not load at all.

I love the New York Times , when I grow up my goal will be to get in the newspaper company. I downloaded TheNewYorkTimes today hoping it would bring me motivation and would give me a nice motto . I felt really good about this because it’s basically all I ever read . I decided to get in TheNewYorkTimes for a while and save some articles for later , some minutes passed and I had to subscribe to read the articles. I got so mad because I love the New York Times. I know I can still read the articles in safari but what’s the fun in that. Why do we need to pay to read articles anyway. It’s like having to pay a lot to get a newspaper. I understand a app is different but I have seen billions of other newspaper apps in which you don’t have to pay. The subscription is also too expensive , why have a subscription anyway. I hope someone reads this and makes a change in TheNewYorkTimes because seriously I’m crying in the inside. When I got the subscription thing I felt as if someone stabbed me in the back. It just feels like an excruciating thing , I really hope I can get this to be read so this trepidation stops.

Very functional app (more buggy lately on my iPad, but a minor annoyance). I appreciate the varied views (Today, Sections, For You). Nonetheless, I read NYT digitally only, almost always through my ios app, and I feel I miss a lot of what I’d like to read because of this.

I dutifully read the front-section national & intl news, skim op-ed headlines, but I most look forward to other sections (esp science, books, education, and cooking).

I wish I cd follow particular columns, which I miss frequently and end up needing to search for. For example, I often miss the biweekly Crime books review: though I look at the Books section 2-3 times each week, I rarely see that column in the stories that appear. Trilobites shows up often in the For You feed, but I often discover other recent pieces only in end-of-article links.

And I dislike the sometimes out-of-publication-date order of articles in Sections view. Where are the small stories on the book biz, the aforementioned Crimes book column, the book comic? I don’t understand why I see them only intermittently.

Recently, I often skip the Today view and go to Sections—Today’s Paper to see everything. Sort of a pain to push through the default layout, then (the bug that never goes away) do the required bounce to Sections, then to another tab, then back to Sections to get the display to appear, then finally open Today’s paper.

If I could rate this a ‘zero’, I would. Sadly, the user experience really is THAT bad. I’ve been using the Times app for several years, and while the journalism is as always very good, the usability of TheNewYorkTimes has degraded over time (both the iPad and iPhone versions). The website version is better, possibly because everything loads so much faster, and navigation with the larger screen real estate is better, but it’s still ad-heavy.

I know it’s tempting to push timelines on app development, and it can be challenging working with the 3rd party developers I’m sure have been used here. BUT, proper user testing is a MUST because if it’s not done right you’ll damage your Equity. Not just the Equity of TheNewYorkTimes , but the NYTimes equity - because apps are now the face of many organization! And for every low-rated review there are at least 10 or more upset users! Most don’t bother to write a review, and potentially a decent fraction will leave as subscribers.

I want the Times to succeed - we desperately need good journalism in these times. Please read and heed the (low-rated) reviews on this site; don’t just look at the numbers!

I read the NYT multiple times daily. I love TheNewYorkTimes and how it presents both plain text articles and rich interactive content seamlessly. I’ve been patiently waiting for the Times team to incorporate an iOS dark mode feature for a YEAR now (that’s when Apple released the native functionality). C’mon developer team? I’d imagine it’s an issue with interactive content not showing as intended or something, but It’s literally just inverting the background! At a minimum, this should
be an option for regular-way articles.

Whomever is reading this at NYT — you...YES, you! Listen up! I represent your most loyal readers, and I nominate YOU to make this your personal pet project for 2020. Run it up the internal ladder and make it happen, please! This way we can continue reading without waking our partners with a pocket sunbeam in hand. It’s just practical. I hate to compare, but it’s worth noting that WaPo has had dark mode for years now.

I have been a New York Times subscriber for digital and weekend print edition for almost 12 years now. I have always liked their news coverage,opinions, articles about everyday stuff that I could believe could be so interesting, Mini crossword, and almost everything they publish. But in the past few years the online version has become addictive and the way they seem to do it is by taping in the outrageous feeling and then suggests more articles like it. It’s very draining to feeling that way day in and day out. I can’t believe I come back to get more of it. I feel some articles have become to click-baity. That should not be the way to customer engagement and keeping them there longer.I don’t like that my attention is being used this way by a product that I pay for.

Weekend with the print edition is so much better no way going down a rabbit hole and can stay away from the comments. I feel I’m in more control of the time I spent reading print. But I guess print won’t last beyond a few more years. Sigh!

TheNewYorkTimes is too expensive for the amount of glitches one constantly has to navigate-
Scrolling is always stuck-the bottom half is always missing -except for the ads and the games section at the bottom. Also I watch a lot of movies and series -so I like to read the reviews-however NYT reviews don’t turn up in the search unless they are recent releases and if you search for a review via Google-you only get a minimal amount of “free” reads before it locks you out and says that you have to subscribe to the NYT to read a review any further-but I DO subscribe-and there’s no option to enter my info-so access to entertainment reviews that aren’t current-doesn’t exist-I’ve contacted support about this but no answer has been offered-
Soooo ya the most user-unfriendly subscription that is on my phone
P.S. I don’t understand why access to the recipes is an additional charge for subscribers when you can just Google the NYT recipe and it pop rights up
Thanks for the chance to rant

They won’t update the stories on the old app anymore, so I am stuck with the new one. No bylines for articles seems an easy thing to correct, but they refuse. Often I can’t close an article unless I close the whole app first. TheNewYorkTimes downloads ads and everything else pretty slowly at times and jerks up and down as it continues loading making it difficult to read anything. It takes a couple of minutes to get other sections or favorites most of the time. The format makes it slower to review the major stories and there may be annoying moving things on ads and photos that distract from reading. If this continues, despite reading the NYT for decades, I’ll check out WaPo. I wonder if the Times execs even know what the digital company that provides this garbage is doing. Ask customer disservice a question and you may never get an answer, or get several answers from different people. The answers frequently do not match up with the question so I guess they are hiring people from another planet with a loose connection with English. The Times claims to be supportive of consumers, but when it comes to their own product, they are just another giant corporation sticking it to the
public. Being hypocrites rates you lower than the usual jerks.

The previous app was far, far better than the new one. Slow and inefficient to use (regardless of any claimed improvement in download speed). Simply mindless. For example, if you want to read an op-Ed that isn’t included in “Top Stories”, you have to click on “Sections”, which never works on the first try; go back to “Top Stories”, then click “Sections” again. This finally gives a choice of sections; for whatever reason, this back and forth process happens every time I try to use “Sections”. When you finally get to “Sections”, you click “Opinions “, which takes you to a list of opinions. But, often all you get is the opinion headline, with no indication of the author. (Yesterday, I don’t think any of the headlines had an associated author, today some do.) Ridiculous. I never want to be bothered with a Maureen Dowd opinion, but I never want to miss a Gail Collins opinion (unless she’s writing with Bret Stephens). Why make readers hunt like this for the info that they want? Didn’t have to do this with the prior app. Stupid, stupid, stupid. NYT might as well have hired someone to sabotage TheNewYorkTimes experience; sure as hell didn’t get someone to improve the experience. Disgusting!

I really wish those responsible for TheNewYorkTimes would focus on delivering basic functionality for those of us who wish to read the news, rather than devoting so much energy to videos, virtual reality, and the like. I pay hundreds of dollars a year for my print subscription to the Times, and generally only resort to TheNewYorkTimes on days when it isn’t delivered due to a “production delay.” On those days, it drives me nuts that after recent updates, the last line of text before each ad is always partially obscured by the ad. It’s as if the Times has no respect whatsoever for its own reporters and the content they produce, let alone the readers who support them.

Also, I have several iOS devices, including an older iPod Touch that runs iOS 9.3.5. It's very aggravating that TheNewYorkTimes basically doesn't work at all on that device, since the description claims it's compatible with 9.0 and above.

The New York Times remains the indispensable source for Americans who hope to be informed about what is going on in the United States and the world. It is a terrible shame that TheNewYorkTimes doesn't do a better job of bringing the paper of record into the digital realm.

How many ads can you jam onto a page? Sooooo many, apparently. The same ad, over and over and over. Guys, if I don’t engage the first time, I’m not engaging the 25th time, either. Banner ads aren’t much more than blocks of color the eye skips over—take it from me, I’m in advertising, they don’t work—but MAN those blocks get annoying when they’re stacked right after each paragraph of text. Today I read the Times through my browser just so I could use Reader View. You want to push everyone in that direction? So no one ever sees any ads at all? Maybe just try fewer ads so resorting to Reader View doesn’t become a trend.

Another thing—the blocks of links to other stories, BEFORE the end of the story I’m reading. So many times I think, wow, weird end to this article, then I realize it’s not the end, there’s another paragraph or two after links to 50 other articles. Super annoying. You don’t want people to finish the current article? You think my attention is that short?

You know how bad you have to get for me to interrupt my morning, come to TheNewYorkTimes Store, and write this review? Seriously bad. I expect more of The NY Times.

I’m on a fast WiFi connection and an iPhone X with the latest OS. When I open the NYT app it takes 3-5 seconds to open. Then after another 3-5 seconds the top story reloads to a different story. I end up having to wait up to ten seconds to even begin reading, and after a jarring experience.

I really love NYT and want to support it, but the iOS app is sub-par, especially when compared to the Washington Post app. I read both daily, but find myself always reading the WP first because TheNewYorkTimes experience and news layout is so much better. The NYT should be able to do at least as well, but TheNewYorkTimes is chronically a laggard. I’m boggled that an organization as large, esteemed and technically savvy as the NYT cant get this right and actually lead all the others. I actually worry about what it implies for the organization’s success, because I want it to succeed. If I ever have to reduce my subscriptions to only one major news organization, at this point it would be the WP. It would have been the NYT two years ago.

I've been a NYT subscriber for over 20 years and I love it! It always made my day seeing the NYT in my driveway, especially on Sunday. After moving to the country I had to start using the digital edition and it's really, really great.
This last update and new app could use a few tweaks. I do enjoy the layout and it's esthetically very enjoyable. And the ads, no big deal! You have ads in all print newspapers and magazines that you pay for, so what's the issue? They're not interfering with the stories so I'm fine with it. What I do not like is the fact you can't add or move more of your favorite sections to the top column like before. You can only move like 5 or 6 now. Really wish you'd correct that please.
But other than that I still really enjoy it and will continue to subscribe.
Thank you!

I love the NY Times coverage of news, in an abstract sense. But I’m increasingly disappointed with the presentation of it in TheNewYorkTimes. The top headlines keep changing on the front view, which encourages a bad habit of just skimming the latest. Some of the best content is now buried under multiple taps through the small “other sections” icon in the corner, easy to miss, while the “Opinion” section has unfortunately prominent placement. Additionally, it would appear TheNewYorkTimes development team either has no QA staff, or doesn’t empower them to test, or doesn’t fix any bugs they find as I continually see visual and navigational glitches all over the place. Advertisements bounce up and down, frequently the back arrow to exit an article disappears, and various other annoying quirks. I frequently have to close and reopen TheNewYorkTimes to work around these issues. TheNewYorkTimes could be really great, if there were UX designers and software testers to help spend the time on it.

I quite understand the need to support NYT journalism with advertising on the paper version (which itself involves costs) and on the unpaid version of the news app/website. However, to bloat every single article viewed through a digital subscription with multiple advertisements is a true disservice to loyal subscribers. It is all the more disturbing because under previous versions the platform was ad-free and more complete (i.e. archive access?). Thus NYT digital subscribers now pay exactly the same amount each month for a service that has considerably worsened over time. The majority of other news apps do not include advertising in the “premium”/ paid subscription versions of their applications.
I have been a NYT reader for many years, and I am happy to contribute monetarily to the important journalistic work this paper does. However, there must be a better way, that is less offensive to the paper’s subscribers!
Please return to the previous ad-free approach for digital subscriptions.

It took the Times a while to fix all the problems with the new app, but now it is excellent. They have remedied all the issues I identified in my initial review. Thanks for listening. TheNewYorkTimes now mirrors the excellent layout used in the web page version.
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The Times thinks this is an improvement? They would be sadly mistaken. I subscribe to the Times to read journalism. The new app blows up photos so that less content appears on the main page. On the old app, I can scroll through the entire paper and pick out the most interesting articles by section, just as if I were reading the physical paper. Now just a fraction are on the main page and they are completely disorganized. Please don't phase out the old app. The new one reminds me of New Coke.

I’m not one for sitting down and reading the news. I’ve probably only picked up a newspaper maybe a good 15 times in my life, and I’ve always felt that watching TV news was always so biased depending on the channel you indulged in. The New York Times app (most particularly their podcasts) offers unbiased, factual accounts of the most relevant news you need to keep to date in. It’s like I get my own personal memo from them every morning of the world’s most relevant news. I can truly say that TheNewYorkTimes is for the millennial that wants to keep informed. Knowledge is power! So thanks, New York Times, for giving us power on a daily basis 👊🏻 So turn on those app notifications, and get your daily dose of power!

I love The NY Times, and I want to love TheNewYorkTimes, but I’ve noticed that whenever I’m on the subway, TheNewYorkTimes frequently hangs and freezes while I’m scrolling through an article. This bug has been going on for a long time, and seems to be related to the need to load images or adds while scrolling down. It seems to freeze or hang while it attempts to download the ad or image, which—when you’re on a subway with an unstable internet connection—means frequently TheNewYorkTimes appears to freeze for several seconds. There has to be a better way for developers to architect how TheNewYorkTimes is designed. I know I can’t be the only New Yorker suffering from this frustrating problem. TheNewYorkTimes didn’t used to do this, and other news apps don’t seem to have this problem. But for the past year or so, it really has impacted my ability to read The NY Times during my commute. Help!!!!

The content itself, including images and video reporting all loads quickly but the ads load slowly, or sometimes not at all. Pre-roll ads on video reporting are particularly troublesome. I have to force close TheNewYorkTimes to get them to load, and the video won’t play until I watch the ad. Then there’s the ads in the middle of text articles, which sometimes flicker and move up and down the page, moving the text with it over and over making it impossible to read the actual piece.

Then there’s the problem with inappropriate ads. The ads are provided by google apparently, so I presume there are no humans at the wheel deciding whether it’s a good idea to put lingerie on my screen while I’m trying to read the morning news in public.

I don’t know how much my digital subscription is being subsidized by these awful buggy ads, but I’d be happy to pay a higher cost if it meant getting rid of all of this so I can actually see the content I’m paying for.

I use TheNewYorkTimes every day, have been a longtime print and online reader, and find TheNewYorkTimes experience continuously degraded by ads. It usually fetches content quickly (on a good connection) though loading TheNewYorkTimes can be slow (scrolling is blocked, likely waiting on ad networks). Offline reading of designated sections is great. Any time the phone is negotiating a weak signal (eg when connectivity goes in and out on the subway), things freeze up.

Most important and the reason for my low rating is that there’s an ad every few paragraphs! It makes for a terrible reading experience. Hopefully they’ll take the cue of other news orgs and offer an ad-free subscription for a higher price, I’d happily pay up. Also, full screen ads that unexpectedly take over while you’re reading are beyond obnoxious. News orgs are in a tough spot these days, but to the NYT - please don’t alienate subscribers with an ads-first mobile UX.

Several versions back this application was exactly what was needed for a paying subscriber: the best content, good layout, no clutter, no ads. With the last few renditions, TheNewYorkTimes has become more and more ad focused. First, there were picture ads placed on the side of the articles & you could kind of ignore them. With this version, they are placed square
in the center of the text column, with no way to ignore them as you must scroll down through them to continue reading the article. To say the least, this break in the flow of reading is terrifically annoying! NY Times - I will happily pay you extra $$ for a non-ad version of TheNewYorkTimes!! This is the fifth or sixth review of TheNewYorkTimes I've written over the last several years, and sadly each one has been more negative than the last. - Update - the Sports section of TheNewYorkTimes now no longer shows sections of sports, say the MLB scores for all teams, as an example. Terrifically annoying!