San Francisco Chronicle Reviews

This latest incarnation of SFGate is clumsy with lots of duplication and old content replete through the pages. I loved the old e-edition which was a mirror image of the actual paper. You could scroll page by page as if you were reading the actual paper. This version, the Front Page is muddled with subtitles and a few pix. It’s unclear where the big stories are! The Local section is often a repeat of the Front Page. Scroll down and you’ll find old articles from days or weeks before that I’ve already read. It’s frankly boring and lacks any pizzazz. Bring back the e-edition.

SanFranciscoChronicle has a hopeless layout for daily readers like me. I’m constantly weighing unsubscribing. It is frustrating trying to find new daily content because they prioritize features and lists, and shard every section in too many topical subsections. As a result I've continued trying to read the e-edition, which they are rudely making harder to use. I subscribe to the NY Times, The Washington Post and the Athletic and all are a pleasure. The Chronicle is frustrating. The Chronicle needs a serious UX investment and reboot. God knows I hope they read the specific critiques here. I’ve tried to convey this unsuccessfully via other feedback channels.

I’m a Bay Area native, but currently live out of state. I still enjoy keeping up with Bay Area news and sports, and SanFranciscoChronicle generally works fine for that. However, I’ve found it nearly impossible to cancel a subscription after the promotional offer is up. There is no way to cancel a digital sub without a phone call, and the number only stays open until 2:30 pm PT. And when you do call, no one answers. It is easier to get ahold of your state Unemployment Dep’t! I sent an email to complain, and the reply was filled with lies and false information on how to cancel using a web browser - which does not even give the option. Despite all my efforts to cancel, my sub is still active. This is obviously the intent of corrupt management to make it as hard to cancel as possible. I finally had to call my credit card to block future charges, and might even have to close the card to guarantee it won’t be charged again. These types of unethical and fraudulent business practices should not be allowed on SanFranciscoChronicle store!

The iPad app is obviously low on the priority at the Chronicle. No one at the company reads the paper on it, or it would never be this bad. Unreliable offline use, no previously-read indicator, changing headlines, reloading while you are reading an article, no clear timeline for article availability, odd categorization of stories (business is “tech” but includes Oakland Tech basketball because of poor filtering)… the list goes on and on. To top it off, the feedback function is answered by what appears to be an outsourced company who doesn’t care, and the reader can’t submit a screenshot to show the issue because their email doesn’t accept attachments that large. It’s fine for reading articles if you don’t mind clickbait headlines and losing state all the time, but it’s pretty frustrating when compared with how SanFranciscoChronicle was better a few years ago.

SF Chron folks, you can be doing so much better. The content has a jumbled timeline where days old articles appear as Top of the News. The “Top” of the news is actually placed at the way bottom of the page. And there is no search function that I can find. I appreciate the special tracker pages and breaking news compilations for fires and COVID. But from a news content standpoint it lacks cohesion and clarity.

I have two e-news subscriptions: New York Time for national and world news; SF Chronicle for local SF Bay Area news. The Chronicle’s national and international news coverage is not what it used to be and gets skimpier each year, whereas is local news coverage is good.

SanFranciscoChronicle is buggy and it takes the developers longer than they should to fix bugs, especially when SanFranciscoChronicle just fails to deliver content.

SanFranciscoChronicle beach balls a lot. Especially if you get an alert to a story and swipe it. It rarely goes to the actual story, instead of just beach balls. Not real reader friendly either. You can’t adjust the size of the fonts. Many of the stories stay for a really long time, like they don’t have enough content to fill SanFranciscoChronicle .

About the only reason to subscribe is if you live in San Francisco and you want to be charitable to a venerable but aging newspaper that’s trying to stay modern with digital content. The news content is very limited, it’s nothing like the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times or New York Times.

SanFranciscoChronicle has some annoying features. It seems to jump back up to the top of the article while you're reading so you have to keep scrolling down to find where you left off. Today I started reading a long article. If I set my phone down for a minute it moved to another article. Very frustrating! Also, it's really hard to find articles or sections that you know exist but are missing from SanFranciscoChronicle. I like the Sunday book section but apparently I can only read that on the e-edition.

It’s not rare for the crossword screens to fail to load and just show a blank white screen. I get that sometimes there will be server errors or whatnot, but at least show an error message to that point. The user has no idea what’s going on, will it eventually load? Has it already errored out and just not bothered to tell you? Poor app developer decision.

All that great local reporting in convenient app format. I wish the integration between SanFranciscoChronicle and the website worked better (or were replaced.) SanFranciscoChronicle has a separate login from the website and regardless of how many times I follow the link account prompts it just doesn’t work. I can open stories from SanFranciscoChronicle itself but opening a story from social media is just impossible.

Too often I find a good article I want to read on my pad … to find it is too small to easily read and enjoy. So frustrating for seniors whose eyes are not as good as they once were. Allowing a zoom feature would do the trick and about half of digital subscriptions allow this capability. So why not the Chronicle?

I appreciate the search function added earlier in the year. A glaring issue remains with the refresh rate, though it appears not to refresh in The middle of reading a story as I believe it used to.

Most news apps I’m familiar with can hold a page in place when the device is paused, or even when exiting SanFranciscoChronicle and coming back later. (the Guardian app is a good example.) This holds the place the reader last encountered. The SF Chronicle app refreshes the story in either case, going back to the top. This is especially difficult to work with in longer articles. Think bus commuter, or work break reader.

Please add this common function to make SanFranciscoChronicle much more usable.

I am very enjoying SanFranciscoChronicle and it’s almost perfect. I would like to be able to rearrange the headers at the top of SanFranciscoChronicle “front page, culture, politics, etc” to better reflect my reading priorities and preferences. Additionally, I have noticed one glitch. When I have been reading an article and I have scrolled down to somewhere in the middle or rear the end, if my phone then goes to the Lock Screen as I take a small break, when I then open my phone SanFranciscoChronicle pulls me up to the beginning of that article, loosing my place. A small bug but still room for improvement. Otherwise SanFranciscoChronicle is great!

Great news coverage for the most part (except for their strangely anti-union stances in some ostensibly neutral articles). Unfortunately, SanFranciscoChronicle can be a bit glitchy. When I switch to another app and come back, it reloads the article I was reading such that I lose my place. Sometimes, it switches to another article altogether.

Frustrations:

- When you are midway through an article, switch to another app, then return to the article, more often then not it will return to the top of the article, loosing your current scroll position.

- The Navigation Controller implementation is optimized for iterating through each article that is available. The normal apple design pattern of swipe from the left to return to the parent view controller is not used, instead, swiping from the left goes to the previous article (and accordingly, swiping from the right takes you to the next article). I truly hate this behavior because I find maybe 1 in 4 articles worth reading, and back out to the main article feed far more often than seeking to the next article.

I pay for it and when I see articles online I wish it might prompt to open SanFranciscoChronicle on mobile where I’m already logged on instead I have to log in on the mobile browser. I like it just somethings that would make the subscription better for all with these kind of conveniences

Suddenly I stopped getting the E-edition email and link. Called the Chronicle 5 times and each time my was told they had linked it to my email and I would get it in the morning. Never successful. Nothing like calling each morning to hunt for your paper.

Finally, you’ve added search and fixed that annoying push notification bug. Thank you.

Wow! Great work developers. I asked for a search function and you built it in!!!

My son and I tested it out and it works better than the New York Times!! ( you can search by keyword and author. )

Thank you.

Here was my earlier review:

SanFranciscoChronicle is fine. The content skews locally, exactly like we need living in the Bay Area.

But where is the little magnifying glass that allows me to search for articles?

This is 2020! Wouldn’t a search function be common sense?! Am I just missing it? I have looked all through SanFranciscoChronicle .

Truthfully you could direct me to SFGate articles too. Then you would retain my viewership and I would see the ads you have embedded there- thus creating additional revenue for the quality journalism to be found in this paper.

Please?!

Years ago I lived in SF and got hooked on the Chronicle. Then moved to E Bay and still subscribed. Now I live 2 hours away from SF in a retirement community ( being 80 next B-Day) and get my Chronicle fix in my cell on SanFranciscoChronicle . Best newspaper ever! Complete news stories, excellent editorial, good world news coverage, even the comics. Since it’s an app, it goes everywhere with me, even traveling world wide. Before Covid my husband, several family members an I went on a cruise to Northern Europe, Chronicle came with. Then we did the Mediterranean cruise and Chronicle came with me too. Hope Chronicle wins more awards, we’ll deserved in my opinion.

I never used SanFranciscoChronicle in the past because I had a much better experience just using the mobile website. In my (print) Sunday paper they were touting the “all new” app so thought I would try it out. While SanFranciscoChronicle experience looks much improved, it would only allow me to see 3 articles even after linking my print subscription. When I click on the prompt for me to sign in, it says that my subscription is already linked. You would think that a company in the center of the tech world could get their **** together.

Whenever I try to read the Chronicle I get a message saying that I have read my last free article for the month even though I am a digital subscriber. If I tap the sign in button it tells me that I am already signed in-or allows me to sign in. In that case I may be able to read one article before I get another message saying that I have read my last free article- and round and round.
Quitting SanFranciscoChronicle and my subscription.

UPDATE #2 Six months later none of these issues have been addressed. Reluctantly canceled my subscription on May 13.

UPDATE: two months after I submitted this review, the same problems (missing features, no search function, etc.). Today I have to find these features by searching the Internet (where I end up reading Mick LaSalle’s column on the sites of competing newspapers, even though the SF Chron is his home). I still rate SanFranciscoChronicle one star because there is no lower designation. (Complaints in my original post are detailed below.)

Two features that regularly drew me to the previous app were the Ask Mick LaSalle column, and the horoscopes (especially Sunday’s Minerva feature).

The latter might sound silly, but checking the horoscope was a fun daily ritual, followed by reading articles of interest. Now that there is no daily horoscope, I’m out of the habit and ease of visiting the Chron app at all (I’m not going to invest the extra time in looking it up and reading the paper on my laptop at work).

Similarly the Ask Mick LaSalle column – if I happened to miss it, very easy to enter it in the search field, and then I’d stick around reading other items – but now it’s inaccessible, unless I happen to visit SanFranciscoChronicle the day it’s published.

I’m sure your intent wasn’t to shift daily readers to an occasional rare visit, but at least in my case, that’s the result.

The most “buggy” of all my newspaper apps and I subscribe to a lot of newspapers. I put in the password I’ve saved, they say invalid, I go through resetting, they say now I can use it, but that lasts maybe once IF THAT and then the password is back to not working. Obviously, they really don’t want you to use an ad blocker but they say it’s allowed if you’re a subscriber, but clicking on “Log In” on that page about ad blocking gets you nowhere. How about the option to turn off ad blockers? Other sites do that. I rarely get to use this digital subscription so I might have to cancel, and that’s a shame since this is my local paper!

Developers, PLEASE read and fix the link to subscription fixture!

SanFranciscoChronicle is poorly designed, it consistently reminds me I only have “3 free stories left this month | get access” but I have linked SanFranciscoChronicle to my subscription countless times. It has gotten so irritating that I am tempted to cancel my subscription. The new format is “OK”, but we still are unable to access prior papers and certain stories seem to linger on the Front Page for days. It would be nice to have access to an archive of the prior published papers. On a positive note, the vault is an interesting section, especially the vault photographs.

I understand that the Chronicle wants to jump on the fad of large blocks of empty space and pictures that other news apps have recently adopted. I don’t like it but I understand. Why then not allow users to customize by minimizing or eliminating pictures, or adjusting text size? You can’t adjust text size in SanFranciscoChronicle like before, and it also does not appear to respond to the text size adjustment in iOS.

I still read a traditional newspaper because I want words. I don’t want pictures, I don’t want white space. Words. Please.

Very underwhelming. You’ll see the same article repeated in different sections and it will also appear for multiple days. What kind of “daily” newspaper is that?
I much prefer the e-edition of the Chron’s cross town rival the San Jose Mercury News. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I like being able to see an entire digital image of each page and then select any article I wish to read.
As a sports fan, I think the Chron’s long time sports columnists are tops. Too bad there isn’t a better platform on which they can publish.

Two major problems. First, when I click on almost any article labeled “Feature “, I get told that I’ve reached some limit and need to subscribe. Well, I am subscribed through SanFranciscoChronicle ! There seems to be a disconnect between SanFranciscoChronicle and some types of articles, but not others. Second, when I try to click through to a link in an article I’m reading, the link takes me to the web version of the paper, and again I’m asked to subscribe in order to read the linked material. This is seriously dysfunctional.

Two major problems: first, there is no search function (or at least it's not easily found). Second, the front page and subsequent pages/sections are populated by old articles. Nothing like opening the Local News section on January 2 to find out about public transportation options for New Years Eve - an article that ran two days prior and is now totally irrelevant. I read the newspaper to find out about NEWS (that's why it's not called an oldspaper). C'mon Chronicle...if you're committed to delivering online news, prove it. If you're not committed, then stop publishing an online edition.

The new SF chronicle app is unbelievably worse than the prior app. It is hard to find at a glance which articles I want to look at. Prior app much better. Also there is no search feature? What kind of news app doesn’t have search?? Very bad. And I can’t access horoscopes. Did they forget to put a link? There is perhaps a lack of alignment in terms of how the paper sees itself and how the users see it. I’d rather see this versus many of the articles.

Fix it now!!

About a month ago, the e-edition stopped working on SanFranciscoChronicle . Notifications were sent out, and it seemed like the Chronicle was preparing to fix this significant bug. But now, four weeks later, I still can’t read the e-edition through SanFranciscoChronicle . Is this still an issue the Chronicle is trying to solve or is that feature no longer available?

Really. No option to adjust the font size? How about doing away with the silly light gray text. It is impossible to read when the text is soooooo small. Hard to believe living in the global tech capital that I have to explain these common and appreciated features.

Words cannot describe how poorly this ap works. Constant freezes essentially make reading the Chronicle impossible. I have been trying to read just one section and have wasted 30 minutes. When will the Chronicle address the problem?

Deleted SanFranciscoChronicle & reinstalled as directed. Much improved, thank you! Able to enjoy Chronicle again.

What happen to the search feature on the latest update?

Wow. I didn’t the think the chron had it in them to make a good app. For the last few years I’ve regularly rated the SF Chron as 1 star. The latest update is huge and very welcomed. You can debate the style and I’m sure there will be tweaks. But so far, SanFranciscoChronicle is useable! That only would be a major improvement in itself but the design is modern too.

The previous app froze and crashed so much that I’d stopped using it altogether. The new one is great! Stable, fast performance, nice layout, very easy to use. Great job!

I withheld one star due to lack of a search function - a must-have for a newspaper app. Hopefully that can be added before too long.