Contact The Wall Street Journal Support

I won’t comment on the journalism, because this is a review of the app itself. First thing to note is that it is clunky. This is worsened by the scrolling experiences which purposely slows the screen scrolling when you encounter an advertisement so you have to view the ad instead of just scrolling past. Additionally you cannot easily select text. I like to select the text and press “Look Up” to learn more about a certain word or phrase. The most you can do is long press a single word and it will give you the option to define that one word, or you can select the entire paragraph, no in between. At first it might seem like glitches, but as an app developer myself, I know that you have to purposefully choose to implement these properties into your app. Lastly, the UI and search are difficult to navigate. If you are looking at economy news it gives you the ability to tap on a ticker symbol to view more info, but it frequently fails to even incorporate that feature into most ticker symbols rendering it effectively useless. Best I can say is that this app is basically a reference for articles that you saw in the paper, but it doesn’t suit well as your everyday news experience.

The latest version of the WSJ app has many excellent features. I like very much the real time updating of current news. The insertion of video embedded within articles adds a lot of texture and detail. It is extremely useful to have links to supporting material highlighted in blue allowing a quick trip to scan the related article. I have only two complaints. First: many of the articles have animated memes or images that constantly alternate between one image and another producing pseudo-animation. This may be intended as an attention grabber, but it is also highly annoying and distracting. Seeing motion in ones peripheral vision tends to take the reader’s attention off the text and back to the animation. I have to resort to covering up the animation with one hand in order to continue reading. My other complaint concerns full-page advertising appearing in a several page article. The software resists swiping past the advertising to the next page of the article. I realize that this is done so people like me can’t simply breeze past ad copy that they don’t wish to look at. When I had only the print version of the Journal, I could easily ignore the advertising copy. With the online Journal I have to fight ad copy that refuses to yield to a page-turn gesture. I don’t like paying more than $400 a year and find myself forced to look at something in which I have no interest.

The app itself is ok and would probably be considered good for your average person. I have access to the Bloomberg Professional app for work though, so I don't use the WSJ app as I otherwise might as it can't really compete (it also costs a lot, lot less). My one (I feel fairly major) complaint about the app would be in regards to its search function. There is no method available to sort search results (such as time ordered or relevance), resulting in searches where it takes me a while to find an article published that same day if I do not make my search more specific. This would've been acceptable five years ago, but this feature is commonplace in a lot of news apps nowadays. I do appreciate the WSJ's efforts to remain balanced, though they do sometimes get a little off balance in terms of some of the op-ed's they publish from contributors and even with articles by some of their journalists who steer things too far right/left (those people are still entitled to their opinions, but they seem out of place in a paper from a news outlet trying to maintain balance in the world of today). And even then, I still appreciate the vast majority of what they publish, even if we don't always agree.