South China Morning Post Reviews

Until recently, App was very good (5 stars). There is a mandatory update and app is not usable until you update.
New version is awful. Using a iPad, entire site is in portrait mode only, very difficult to navigate or just find anything. Pages that were fast loading are slow and freeze.
Change for clear improvement is good. In this case change seems to be for no other reason than to move things around. If it’s not broken, don’t try to “fix” something. One more thing; this is not just SouthChinaMorningPost but most in general. Graphics folks need to be taught layout. Style and order have become a thing of the past. Fonts that are too small, images that don’t fill an area, grey text on grey or light white background needs to stop ASAP. Young folks generally have good eyesight but for majority of folks, vision is not what it usto be. Take this into consideration when creating

Not a fan of the newly updated format. It looks nice but it’s hard to find & search for articles. I prefer the older (& what probably seems to most a more boring & outdated) version/format because it’s a lots easier to scroll through the content & find what articles I want to read. The older way of navigating through the “Tabs” is a lot easier also. Now, it seems like I would have to scroll all the way back up to the top of the page & go thru the Menu to get to the other sections. Please fix these issues in your next update.

There I am, in my quiet but crowded work office when I get an interesting news article notification from SouthChinaMorningPost. I click the notification expecting to be taken straight to the article, when instead an ad with a literal screaming person starts going off and breaking the office silence. To add, my phone was on silent mode! I don’t know how I could have prevented that from happening, and I no longer trust opening SouthChinaMorningPost in quiet environments in fear of causing me embarrassment.

With another news app I use, notifications stop coming on some devices at times or led to missing articles altogether, but I have never encountered it in SouthChinaMorningPost, so the experience is comparatively superior by far. The interactive graphics and videos embedded within many articles are great work too.

Pay for a subscription? Great! You get the luxury of being inundated with ads. On any given screen of SouthChinaMorningPost , up to 80% or the screen is covered in ads. A massive banner across the top: ad. Between every other story on the home page: ad. Every third paragraph in a story: ad. A mobile app has reduced screen space, but SCMP shamelessly saturates it with ads that make SouthChinaMorningPost nearly unusable. All of those screenshots you see above are just renders, not what you’ll actually see. Why am I paying for this?

Having an interest in current news and information that I had previously been unaware, SCMP has been a consistent and reliable source. Initially my concern of biases, which when cross referenced with other information sources, happily has been minimal.
Thanks for providing another source for interesting news.

Although I enjoy the content and of the news and also the new formate changes. I need SouthChinaMorningPost to be LANDSLIDE available on iPad platform!!!

Very clean and crisp interface. Embedded videos work and it is easy to save articles you’re interested in for a later time. As for the quality of the journalism itself I have always been impressed by the wide range of viewpoints. Including articles critical of their owners -alibaba- or national government.

Assuming that the soon to be released upgrade to SouthChinaMorningPost looks like the website, the new app will be absolute trash.

The website is hard to navigate, its performance is pitifully slow. Your web developers are obviously third rate. They certainly do not test their work.

Do not update SouthChinaMorningPost to function as the website. The performance is so bad that I might entirely stop using SCMP as a news source.

I tried this because I was tired of the “click more” and blue “subscribe” bar of the web version. However I can block ads on the web version and can’t tolerate them on SouthChinaMorningPost , the are distracting because they are animated. Also when scrolling if swiping on a picture it will misinterpret as a tap and the picture opens. App deleted, back to web.

No matter who claims to be the owner, publisher of SouthChinaMorningPost it is completely controlled by China’s communist party. Any opinions on articles that are not deemed to go along with the narrative that they want you to believe will be removed. Disagree enough times and they will kill your account. Don’t help any members of the ccp, that should include all those that tell the falsehood, that the ccp has no control over them!! It’s time for all freedom loving people of the world to stand up to China, and say enough of your state sponsored terrorism!

After the most recent update was “forced” to all users, SouthChinaMorningPost is now “saturated” with adds all over every news page. I have been using SouthChinaMorningPost for a long time and the adds used to be reasonably placed on pages. Now, I’m considering completely deleting SouthChinaMorningPost . I have to say to South China Morning Post: you made a terrible mistake to follow what US apps do.

I’m done! Deleted SouthChinaMorningPost . Good bye SCMP.

After seeing a lot of ads even with the paid version, I decided to cancel. Then I realized that the trial period it provides perhaps is not a free trial. IOS says I will still be charged for the subscription until the next billing period. Sounds like some kind of trick or scam. Watch out!

I wish I had never been lured to update by the “performance optimisation” description. Now I get more mindless ads and am forced to accept cookies before reading anything.

I refuse to use SouthChinaMorningPost until these changes are fixed—remove the unnecessary ads and provide an option for people to refuse cookies if they don’t want them. I hope a better version comes out soon

I have used my IPad Pro(setup horizontally)to read SCMP for years. All the news was well organized and the user interface was great! This new version is slow, horrible user interface, and the news are awkwardly organized. I can hardly describe how bad it is. My suggestion for future improvements is to test throughly the new version against common mobile devices before releasing it. Thanks!

The top Advertising banner always takes a part of UI. It would distract me when scrolling down.

I can accept Ads appear among pages or articles, but the top Ad banner now fixes on the top so that I can only use part of screen of SouthChinaMorningPost all the time. That’s really annoying.

SouthChinaMorningPost works very well and I’ve never encountered a problem with it. Also, while I have many apps I almost never open, I open SCMP all the time. It’s ease of use and its probing journalism make me want to use it.

The last version I used was by far the biggest drain on my battery. 66 hours of background usage during the last 10 days. Compared to 32 minutes of screen time.

That is a creepy large amount of background time and battery drain. No way to contact SouthChinaMorningPost developer.

I really enjoy the variety of useful photos, videos and reading materials that cover a wide range of subjects by SouthChinaMorningPost. I regularly use these as one of many tools for my class HIS 216 Modern China.
Dr. Erick J. Mann, PhD
Professor of History and Fulbright Scholar

Prior to the update, it was easy to navigate and see articles that are new and popular. The last update made SouthChinaMorningPost unusable. In portrait only doesn’t work well for me either. Too bad - it was a good source of news for me as I live in HK and like to know what’s going on. Now I am not excited to use it. Please fix this

If you have any interest in news from Asia, this is a great source. SouthChinaMorningPost is easy to use and I’ve enjoyed it every day since download. Thanks!

I like the old version better as the new version of iPhone apps does not allow you to logout. Login location is not in Setting either. It’s a very funky design. UI design is full of flaws as well, like extremely high latency of “thumbs up” button and “posting comments”. Maybe it’s due to the rigid censorship in China?? Improvements are needed.

App works great for me. I like the stories because they have links to other stories that I like to catch up on.