Foreign Affairs Magazine Reviews

by JamesMBaker

ForeignAffairsMagazine is a fraction of what it should be. I haven't been able to download the new issue on time for months now and still can't get the most recent one. Moreover, when you're on ForeignAffairsMagazine homepage and want to read a featured article, ForeignAffairsMagazine makes you log in for each article you read despite already being logged in on ForeignAffairsMagazine itself. So, reading eight featured articles require eight individual log-ins. Ridiculous. It's a shame such stellar content is drug down by such poor digital management. It's ironic that they're covering the advancement of technology (the most recent issue is on automation) while simultaneously failing at the most basic automation themselves. Also, I've called them 5 times about this issue and emailed them. No fix yet. Just the same old "yeah, we know there's a problem, we'll fix it" runaround for months now. Horrible customer service.

by Internet Radio Micah

At the recommendation of one of my professors I purchased a subscription to Foreign Affairs. While browsing through the website is easy enough it is almost impossible to get through any articles on ForeignAffairsMagazine . The articles are in depth and often long but if I close ForeignAffairsMagazine and reopen it ForeignAffairsMagazine does not take me back to where I left off. ForeignAffairsMagazine instead takes me back to the main page and then I have to go back and find the article I was reading and hopefully remember where I left off. It has stymied my progress through a handful of articles and now I’m at the point that it just isn’t worth continuing to read on my iPhone or iPad because I know I may have to stop reading an article and will have to go through a whole process just to get back into the article.

by Plimsoll

ForeignAffairsMagazine from ForeignAffairsMagazine Store has for two days given me a message to ‘try again soon.’ After six calls to customer support and resetting my pass word twice, I am no closer to being able to access my subscription on the iPad. (Maybe this works on the iPhone, but I doubt it.). I suspect the message is disinformation, which is bad practice.

I advise staying with the content on the web if you need digital access, at least until they can figure this out. The motto of these developers seems to be, Move Fast and Break Your Face.

By the way, what happened to the old fashioned concept that customer service people who are expected to support an offering should be involved in testing it? Assuming that there was a test plan of any kind, a big assumption.

by Primary Badger

ForeignAffairsMagazine is shameful. It seems to be impossible to login to a current account, even though we have a digital subscription. It asks for the email address for our account, and then it says "this email address is already being used." Yeah, of course it is, I'm not making an account, I'm trying to get login to my account.

And I can't get in touch with customer service to get help. When content providers make it hard to access accounts that are paid for, they push consumers to stealing the product.

by PFBillman

The steady decline of content with a particular leftist slant is very disturbing. You continue to miss the transformational change happening in the world. The publication has become marred in a status quo that mocks anybody that promotes change.

You have consistently used leftist contributors (Stacy Abrams)to push the conversation left. The world order has become stagnant and you lambast President Trump for looking out for America in the world where Europe doesn’t want change. The Paris accords for example was a bad deal for America but a good deal for the Chinese.

If you leftward, slant continues I will be forced to cancel my subscription.

You treated President Obama like a saint because he was a nice guy and went along with the old boys club. His foreign policy was a complete disaster for America. Trump is more like the bull in the china shop, but it is good for the United States. Remember President Jackson was at first looked upon as boor and turned out to be a great president that changed the presidency.

Regards,
Paul Billman

by OnWisc94

It’s difficult to beat the quality of FA’s content, unfortunately ForeignAffairsMagazine is prone to not recognizing paid, active subscriptions and to prompting for additional payment for some bi-monthly issues in a way that cannot be fixed by restoring purchases or even deleting and reinstalling ForeignAffairsMagazine .

Customer service is also entirely unresponsive. They just flat out do not respond to emails.

The issues are only $9.99, so it’s not a fortune, but randomly being required to double-pay to access content for which you’ve already purchased a subscription, and to have no means of addressing it through an active customer service function is....frustrating.

Love the content, but buyer beware on ForeignAffairsMagazine .

by Funkydow

I wish I could give a higher rating, but after spending an hour trying to make ForeignAffairsMagazine work on my iPad, I have to say something. I have an email, a password, and my account number but I cannot log in. I change my password — still no luck. It wants my “use name” but neither email nor account # works — I do have *have* a user name that I know of (and none shows on my account page). And now I have ... notifications! Great, where are they and what are they? Can find them! How can I make them go away? Mind numbing exercise in debugging an app when I would rather be reading that article.

by Outline Happy

While ForeignAffairsMagazine displays content beautifully, you can't enjoy it without struggling with ForeignAffairsMagazine 's non-intuitive navigation tools. Whether you're trying to browse the library, an issue or an article, you must intuitively understand how to do so with these minimal tools OR divert your attention from the message in order to understand the medium. The Economist's app makes navigation intuitive for all readers. FA app developers: Observe The Economist app, learn from it, and get out of readers' way.

by Jessykate1

The content is great. ForeignAffairsMagazine is pretty terrible: it returns to the home screen every time I open it, which creates extra steps to access the magazine content. It's hard to tell the difference between "recent" and magazine content. Do they overlap? It feels like I have to work extra hard to reorient myself to where I was in my reading of the magazine every time I open ForeignAffairsMagazine .

I also use audio a lot and the audio player is just a complete disappointment. It's unclear which pieces are available in audio until you bring up the audio list, but the audio browser is separate from the article browser so it's hard to know which article your want to listen to. ForeignAffairsMagazine doesn't save your place if you leave part way through listening too an article, so I'm constantly starting again or just giving up. The audio doesn't visualize where in the article you are as you go so it's hard to take notes or switch from audio to reading without a lot of work.

Finally I would LOVE it if ForeignAffairsMagazine allowed me to highlight and take notes in it.

Thank you.

by Wolf_walker

I love the Foreign Affairs magazine. I have been subscribing to the magazine through iTunes. I had not had any issue with ForeignAffairsMagazine in the past. But I have repeatedly been unable to download the January/February 2021 issue (latest issue). I have tried deleting and reinstalling ForeignAffairsMagazine . It did not work. I contacted Apple. They advised me to contact the developer. So I emailed the developer, but the email was undelivered.

I am giving ForeignAffairsMagazine a 4-star rating for now. If the developer hears me, and resolves the issue I’ll give them a 5-star.

by Thdyhvfg

I love the fact that foreign affairs as provided an audio version. The audio helps me go much much more out of my subscription. It would be better if the went through audible like WSJ,WP, and NYT... the glitch I see in ForeignAffairsMagazine is that it shuts down when my phone goes to sleep so I constantly have to wake my phone up.... I don’t have this problem with the economist or audible...

by J.M. Near Seattle

I am enjoying reading about the world and the US relationship to it through the lens of all the great writers at Foreign Affairs. I am getting a better view of situations that impact the US, around the globe that I wouldn’t be getting otherwise. Five stars.

by Big Time Writer Guy

Having the same problem as others who complain they can't access their digital copies of their print subscription through ForeignAffairsMagazine . The latest update seems to have broken ForeignAffairsMagazine , and customer service says they're "aware" of the problem, but so far, after weeks, they haven't fixed it. Seriously, it worked before,roll back to the previous version.

by Arajul

Update 2: The “The Latest” section started working again. Also, I appreciate customer support getting back to me.
Update: app’s been pretty buggy lately. The “The latest” section doesn’t load. Overall, ForeignAffairsMagazine is pretty good and the content is great. It would be really nice if saved articles don’t just save locally. I constantly switch between my devices (iPhone, ipad) and none of my saved articles appear on the other devices. Also, it would be nice if ForeignAffairsMagazine had the ability to download articles in the background so it starts up faster and does not do the updating when I launch ForeignAffairsMagazine . If I’m mistaken in any of this and ForeignAffairsMagazine does, indeed, do those things, then please let me know.

by GravitasCH

Nothing catches my interest or makes me feel better informed than Foreign Affairs. The only change I would make is to offer a Dark Mode that uses a truly black background rather than the slightly whitened background used here.

by Chinarye

New app update, new problems; same old story with Foreign Affairs. I'm a paid digital subscriber, but ForeignAffairsMagazine does not recognize my subscription. Previous update wouldn't even allow me to get into ForeignAffairsMagazine . I don't know who is running their digital show, but they need to be canned. I will not be renewing my subscription.

Avoid ForeignAffairsMagazine and Foreign Affairs!

by DailyQuandry

I am a relatively new reader of Foreign Affairs and I enjoy every issue. Picked my first issue up at the airport, settled in on my cramped flight to Vegas, and never put it down. Got back, hemmed and hawed over a subscription, went full Monty and got digital and paper, never looked back. Thoroughly enjoy most everything in every issue. Not sure if I have ever enjoyed a subscription so much.

by Edub1309

I love Foreign Affairs and regularly use ForeignAffairsMagazine to read, however lately older articles/magazines have broken links with a “The requested URL was not found on this server” message. I hope this is fixed soon as it makes having a digital subscription (along with print) essentially useless.

by GMAC PAP DADDY GWORD

This is a great publication. One of the “features” is that it’s only printed 6 times per year. I subscribe to the Economist and feel stressed when not being to devote sufficient time to each weekly issue. I treat this pub more like a book, taking a couple weeks to read it. An added plus is the ability to listen to audio versions of the articles using ForeignAffairsMagazine .

by MDKnit

Adding the audio edition of articles was a great addition to a great magazine. However, there is a major problem: the audio shuts off when you minimize ForeignAffairsMagazine or when the auto-lock activates. This makes the audio almost unusable; please fix this in future updates! However, thanks for adding this to ForeignAffairsMagazine .

by BlitzentheBerner

ForeignAffairsMagazine recognizes me, but I cannot access new issues or my library. I emailed customer service, and they say they're working on the problem. It seems others have had this problem for a while. Great magazine, poor digital management. At the least, the magazine should send an email to all digital subscribers acknowledging the problem and a timeframe for the fix. It's ridiculous that this problem has gone on so long.

by VTReader

Review updated 10 December upon release of “new” and “improved” app...

ForeignAffairsMagazine should be an embarrassment to the Council on Foreign Relations. Period.

New app is released in non-working order. Only two issues can be downloaded. All other issues require payment, even for a subscriber of decades. Links within the TOC of these issues are all dead: you cannot navigate for the underlying content. And the library of historical content has been decimated; only from 2016 is available.

This is a bad joke. CFR, fire everyone involved with this effort and start again. What are you all thinking?

————

Best content in the category, worst app (by a wide margin) among all news publications available on iOS.

Customer service is incompetent and completely useless.

Why CFR doesn’t get its act together is simply beyond me. A great mystery of our time.

by Mocha Ru

Works well as a reader for the journal, but navigating in ForeignAffairsMagazine is difficult and obtuse. No way to browse all past issues. Search doesn’t allow you to force exact string searching with quotation marks, so it’s practically useless. Searching for back issues with articles on “South China Sea” gives you every instance of south .or. China .or. sea going backwards from today. You have to swipe through dozens of screens to get back past 2018.

by K8J7S

The read aloud audio does not always work on the mobile IPhone App. I may receive mixed feedback about my hardware/software update, but they are always up to the latest versions. The Jan/Feb 2020 articles shut down the entire application when trying to use the audible version instead of text.

by Weirfun

App used to work well and i could download new content regularly. Account is still active but the content will not download. ForeignAffairsMagazine is completely useless - if it wasn’t broke, why did you try to fix it with a broken update?

by LFRCHI

Just stopped working. Doesn't recognize my subscription. Customer Service staff is useless. They have no clue of what the problem is or when it will get fixed. It has been 2 weeks and no resolution. Very amateurish.

by Ricky Ferrer

New app is light years better than previous version. It’s now available for iPhone and very easy to use. I particularly like the ability to save articles offline so I can read on subway.