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Zinio always wakes up to ads for more magazines. Then an ugly pop-up occurs, trying to sell you even more of them. There is no option to avoid this. This could be forgivable if we weren’t paying them a bunch of money already for the magazines, but we are. There’s no option for it to wake up showing your library. Then, when you finally are able to display your library, it’s an ugly white-background display with no option for customization. Come on, Zinio, treat us better. And users of Zinio, stop giving this app five stars and encouraging this arrogant behavior. Edit: the developer explained below how to remove the most irritating pop-up ads (turn off notifications—but since when are ads euphemistically called notifications?). Unfortunately, Zinio still necessarily opens to the “home” page, which is entirely ads, and I still get pop-ups. So it’s still ugly and ad-infested—even when we tell it not to be. We pay more money to Zinio than to most apps, which remove ads when you pay them. Zinio is still treating us badly by forcing us to see ads simply upon opening the app, and the alleged fix doesn’t work. So I’m changing my rating to one star. By the way, I notice that the “most helpful reviews” are five stars and are years old, and my actually helpful recent review and others like it are way way down on the “helpful” list. I’m guessing that Zinio has invested heavily in “reviewers”. If only they’d invested in improving their product...

I’ve used this app for about 4 years and though it had some bugs, it was a decent way to read magazines on my iPad. At this point, I’d suggest looking elsewhere. The most recent update deleted all the magazines off of my iPad and in fact the app wouldn’t even start because it couldn’t connect to the Internet. (I guess Zinio product development teams never travel anywhere? Or don’t think their customers do...) Now it appears the magazines that I’ve paid for are stuck in “the cloud” forever unless I re-download all of them. Also it seems everything that I’ve ever looked at is in my library with no way to remove it. Since I’ve already paid for some subscriptions I’ll probably use it until those run out, but after that, I don’t see any reason to continue. They’ve made it very clear people like me who download and read magazines are not their target market.

This platform has been around for over 15 years, and was once the best for digital magazines. That hasn’t been true for awhile. If it weren’t for my large library and a few titles that are only available on Zinio I’d switch. Nearly every version has had trouble switching between portrait and landscape on iPad, often hopping to a completely unrelated spot in the issue and sometimes getting navigation in the table of contents so badly out of sync with what’s being shown that a force quit is required. Over time, my library of content I’ve already bought or subscribed to has become deeply buried. One of the benefits of subscribing to a magazine is the ability to enjoy a new issue without having to dig through the shelves to see when it’s available. Not here. I had to turn off notifications for Zinio entirely because they started pushing so many ads, eliminating the last smooth way to see when a new issue was available. The entire experience is obnoxious.