Star Tribune Reviews

For accessibility, StarTribune FAILS. Since the 3.0 revision introduced one month ago, I can no longer use voiceover to read articles on my iPad. I contacted your tech department three weeks ago about this. Now I see there have been two revisions since then and this issue has not been addressed though I was told it would be. I’m canceling my subscription.

Update: The Mac accessibility function voiceover is working again. This is so essential for those of us in the vision loss community. How much appreciated.

Way better than before. Navigation is intuitive and look pops. Love the relevant coverage and updates. I now prefer to read the news on StarTribune vs through the internet

This new version only worked in portrait mode on an iPad running IOS 15.2 but it was fixed in 2 days. Thanks. From a paying subscriber.

Things feel very snappy now. Pages that used to crash no longer crash. This is really nice work.

Thank you for this quick update for viewing on iPads. Landscape mode is a necessity for most iPad cases!

The comment section opened for my iPhone 11 max pro. It might have taken a bit longer than usual.

I use both the iPhone and iPad version everyday for the news. Thanks for fixing the iPad landscape mode issue.

The new app now supports landscape orientation on the iPad, which is much appreciated. It’s quicker to open articles. Thanks!

I can only see 1 or 2 comments on any article since the latest up grade. If there is 500 comments on an article, I want to read what people are saying. The comments are a big part of my subscription-please get them working!

I like getting news from professional journalists and StarTribune has helped me get that news. StarTribune itself has worked well for me so far, but I’m sure the other low ratings may indicate that there is more work to be done, and hopefully soon. While I like having an app, I’ve found that with my subscription the eEdition works even better from my browser - I really enjoy that experience. Thank you StarTrib for all the great reporting.

Please allow comment posting in StarTribune .

StarTribune forces display to portrait only, which makes it useless to me as I keep my iPad in landscape mode nearly always. It does not properly implement Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

You broke landscape mode with the last update. I use my iPad with a keyboard case 100% off the time. Makes StarTribune pretty much useless. Please fix it.

Frustrating that for my ipad it only displays vertically. Thats totally useless for an ipad. Please fix.

Landscape mode please.

Landscape mode for all of us IPad users.

I'm tired of people complaining that StarTribune is not actually free. Of course there is a limit to the number of articles you can read before you have to purchase a digital subscription - most media news sources (like NYT) are instituting a cap and it makes perfect sense. Sure you can get basic new coverage from the huff post, but the reason you pay for the tribune is because it provides substantially higher quality, original content and deeper analysis from the region's best columnists. The proof is in the pudding - even the people who give 1 star are clearly enjoying StarTribune or else they wouldn't be maxing out their article limit. The subscriptions prices are reasonable and there are many different options to meet your needs. So the choice is yours - pay a little and get the best local coverage that exists or don't pay and be stuck with the silly paragraph long articles full of links to other peoples content. As for StarTribune itself, I found it very usable and clean, it covers all the topics you would expect and it is updated frequently to provide accurate and current information.

I cannot understand why, after years of development, StarTribune continues to be one of the buggiest and annoying apps I have on my iPad. Constantly freezes, cannot scroll smoothly, crashes, and shows old old news on the front page (home) feed. I would like to be able to scroll through the front page without constant freezing which often results in accidental fat fingers selection of a photo or ad that takes you away from the story. I have the fastest internet you can buy so don’t blame this issue on Wifi signal issues. And I don’t want to see a story I read a week and a half ago on the front page (here’s a tip-it’s not news anymore and this isn’t a monthly magazine). Especially frustrating when paying for this service. I want desperately to support the local newspaper but if StarTribune doesn’t improve soon I may have to rely on local tv station apps.

So StarTribune does an inexplicable and thoroughly infuriating thing when you open a push notification. You tap on the push notification hoping to learn more about whatever the notification is about, which launches the Strib app. The Strib app, for no discernible reason then launches a web browser page with the article. If it’s a universally accessible article you can read it in the browser; otherwise it prompts you to log in. Well you were logged in to the DEDICATED APP for the Strib, but, as there is apparently no communication between StarTribune and the browser, beyond this frustrating diversion, you’re not logged in in the browser. Please fix this, or tell me how to adjust my settings to avoid this, but above all fix it.

Deterministically, every time I open StarTribune , the scrolling becomes very choppy after scrolling down 1 - 2 pages on the main screen, and much sooner in literally every article I have ever opened. This is true on both my high end devices, an iPhone 11 Pro and a 2020 iPad Pro, so I can only imagine how many frames get dropped on mid range or low end devices. I am an iPhone engineer for a living so I would love to know how they can make it perform so poorly and how they can not address a problem of this magnitude for so long. Are they not dequeueing their cells properly or are they making service calls on the UI thread? It boggles the mind. C’mon engineers where is the professional pride? Open up Instruments and figure out what’s going on. I am about to delete StarTribune and go full time with the web.

For a while StarTribune was okay, but in the last couple months it has gotten so slow as to be unusable. Even just browsing the headlines or reading an article it is unresponsive and scrolls jerkily, sometimes taking a couple seconds to respond, often interpreting your scroll gesture as wanting to click on whatever article was under your finger.

Heaven forbid you try to write a comment. Typing is unresponsive too. Sometimes I can get half a sentence ahead of what is on the screen.

It’s clear the performance problem is due to StarTribune ’s CPU usage, because my phone gets hot when I’m using StarTribune , and it consumes insane amounts of battery.

And no, there is nothing wrong with my phone. I have a current model iPhone, latest iOS and the latest version of StarTribune . No other apps - including several other news apps I use daily - cause me any problems like this.

C’mon strib... a news app is just a locked down (and simplified!) browser How have you over complicated this into such bloatware?! I’m going back to reading the news on the website using Safari.

I can’t believe we pay for this. In the past few weeks StarTribune has become completely unusable. It is so slow to scroll through pages to read articles. Every few days I give it another chance, but then turn to other news outlets to read the news. After using StarTribune for a few minutes you can’t even move between articles anymore as StarTribune consumes all the power my iPad has. I then close it, open something like USA Today and read some news. Their app has no issue at all. We need to find another source of news in the Twin Cities as the StarTrib has not figured out how to electronically deliver the news in our market. I’m about ready to drop my subscription.

Below is my initial review from November. I’ve changed from 2 stars to 1 star. It is now mid-January and...nothing. App still freezes when a photo is even accidentally touched. Beyond frustrating and it was today...50 days after submitting my review that the Apple review dept checked in. FIX IT OR LOSE YOUR CUSTOMERS!!!

I’ve got the paid version of StarTribune, and it’s pretty frustrating experience using it. The worst thing is the problem with merely touching a photo: the photo pops up and you cannot close it. You have to delete StarTribune and restart it, which is maddening! I see this problem has existed since at least June 2018, its now end of November and...nada, zip, nothing on a fix.

I can’t even tell you how much I wish StarTribune worked. I read the NYT every day online because I mostly can’t access this one. Although I have a paid, current membership it tells me about every other day that it has expired and I no longer have access to content. This is resolved by removing the whole app, downloading it again and logging in. When I click on pictures I get stuck and I have to close the whole app. Many times the screen just freezes on content and I have to close, reopen and try again. I really enjoy my local paper but find I’m not reading it anymore due tech issues. I hope StarTrib can get things resolved.

I enjoy the Strib, but unfortunately this is a bad app that doesn’t do the paper justice. The layout is fine, but StarTribune has severe operational issues. After about 30 seconds of use, it grows increasingly sluggish, so scrolling becomes like pulling taffy, and if you select an article it will struggle for 15 seconds before it finally manages to get it open. The longer you keep StarTribune open, the worse the sluggishness becomes. It’s very much like walking through mud. You have to close StarTribune and then re-open it, every minute or so. Not a good experience. These problems have become especially bad since early May, 2020.

StarTribune has had a problem for a long time with the photos in the articles. If you inadvertently touch the photo while scrolling through an article, the photo opens and you cannot get back to the article or app without bailing out entirely and restarting StarTribune . I have written to the developer directly and I see that others have also commented on this, and yet nothing has been done to correct the problem. It is annoying enough that I often don’t bother going back to StarTribune after having to bail out. Fix this already!

This is a very good news paper app. I have seen lots of bad newspaper apps and this one is one of the good ones. Even if it has a few glitches in it and the apps glitches are very small, and they don’t effect me much. I am very shocked that a small newspaper could make an app this good. I just want them to add more features to StarTribune and fix some of the small problems with it. The. StarTribune would be almost perfect.

It’s my local and first source of news. Lose the comments. It distracts from the actual news. If the trolls or people who want to sprinkle fairy dust on a story need to say something, let them write to the opinion section. It distracts from the story, leaving a reader feeling righteous or vindictive and there is no dialogue.

Otherwise thanks!

Content is excellent. The Star Tribune has some great writers.
StarTribune seems more buggy than it should be. Everything gets jittery and laggy when I scroll through about the second article. It’s really hard to move through more than one story total after that happens.
StarTribune seems to have considerably less content than the print version of the paper.
Finally, why doesn’t StarTribune let the viewer enlarge a photo? You can do this on NYT app.

Wow, this is a hug improvement. The old app was nearly worthless, so it not hard for it to be better, but still StarTribune draws the best aspects from other news apps.

I read newspapers on an iPad for probably at least an hour a day, and I say StarTribune is very good. Nice job.

It’s a huge relief to be done with the old crappy app.

I use StarTribune every day because the web page used to crash all the time. Lately StarTribune has become very jerky and slow - both on iPhone and iPad. Reinstalling only helped a little. Also StarTribune doesn’t include all the articles you’ll see in the printed paper or website. I can only speculate that usage of StarTribune is exceeding capacity of their servers with everyone working from home?

I’ve had StarTribune for quite a while and have been very pleased until a couple of weeks ago when it started freezing up every time I attempt to use it. At best it is very, very slow, but lately I’m lucky if I can read one article before it freezes.
I am extremely frustrated because I just renewed my subscription for a year and now I can’t read the paper online because StarTribune won’t work properly.
Please fix this issue ASAP.

One would think that an app which cost a sizable monthly fee would be smoother. This seems to slow down as it’s used. I’m using it on an iPad. It slows down so much that the pad needs to be rebooted to regain speed. I’m not tech savvy by any means, but I think the files are too large and somehow leave something in the pad’s ram with each page load.

I’m planning on cancelling my subscription and going back to my old practice of buying a hard copy when I feel so inclined.