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I have had and enjoyed the slate app for probably about a year now. It’s a far better mobile reading experience than browser, despite some bugs and the fact that the entire backlog of content is too large for the app. However, the most recent update has left me at the end of my rope. I have slate plus, and the app does not remember that I have logged in. Annoying, but I use a password manager. What pushes this from annoyance to unacceptable is that in order to log back in (after it auto logs me out every time the app closes), I have to uninstall and reinstall because the login page will not display correctly. To be clear, the slate plus login page will only load the first time I open it after a fresh installation. It will not load under any other circumstance. In practice, this means that I must uninstall and reinstall the app every single day to read new articles (I read far more articles than the monthly free limit allows, hence purchasing slate plus). I admittedly have a decently old iPhone (iphone 7) but my iOS is up to date and I have never had this issue with other apps. I have not been able to find a way to contact the app developers about this issue, but hopefully you will see this review and address this extraordinarily annoying problem.

I’ve been a fan of Slate’s content for many years and I’ve thought of them as an essential voice in the American media landscape, so when they started Slate Plus, I signed on and downloaded their app. Prior to that I had just used Apple podcasts. Their app is very weak, to the point where it significantly degrades my enjoyment of their content. It does not effectively attach to the native services of the iOS operating system, so when it’s playing audio and you want to switch to playing music, the Slate audio does not stop. Similarly, if you pause it and then unpause it using external audio controls, via Bluetooth, it doesn’t restart. Now, for the last two weeks in a row, my FAVORITE podcast of all, the Political Gabfest keeps pausing itself every two minutes or so and has to be restarted manually, which requires unlocking the phone and navigating down two levels in the menu structure (again, it does not play well with iOS). So much for listening to it while you cook dinner. The overall performance of the app is very slow and it does not support downloading podcasts in advance so you can listen to them offline. The fact that I’ve had to go back to Apple’s lackluster podcast app would tell you my standards for ease of use are low, but Slate’s app doesn’t meet them.

I have been reading Slate since it began and finally gave in and purchased Slate+ this year because they started metering and tightening the amount of free reads. Maybe that makes me cheap, but I’m a school teacher and try to save pennies where I can. IMO the writing is not what is was 10 years ago, but it is still pretty strong on the whole and still feels indispensable to me. BUT, I don’t know how they can sleep at night charging us almost $60 and giving us an app that is so legendarily dreadful. And the thing is: the app has always been bad. They fix it for a while and then it breaks, again and again. When I wasn’t paying for it, I swallowed my complaints. But c’mon! I know they had a major loss of ad revenue since Covid, which lead to the tighter meter, but can you please allocate some resources to the tech side here? I have to sign in again, every time, for each new story, and the podcast play bar only appears halfway on my iPhone screen. And the podcast does not remember where you paused. And the podcast time codes are often completely unrelated to the actual concepts of time and space. Ugh. I know I said it was indispensable, but after my subscription ends, I will learn to live without if improvements aren’t made.