WHIO News Reviews

My area has been through several big storms in the last couple months. And the only consistent thing about them is that WHIONews will spam ads at you when trying to get the forecast during an emergency and oftentimes WHIONews will crash in general. The fact that the sponsors for WHIONews thought it would be a good idea to continue ads during an emergency and not provide fixes to app crashing updates is just sad. To those responsible for WHIONews (if read) you need to address this. I know now that WHIONews cannot provide time sensitive information when making decisions in a potentially deadly situation, but others may not.

The programmers did a fix sometime back that required a somewhat long press to open a category. Too long, and the press did not work. Too short, and the press did not work. It took some time, but it was possible to learn how long to press.

OK, so they fixed that one, but you could not go back to the story list. The back feature took you back to the category list, and you had to scroll through the stories to find where you were to select the next story you wanted to read.

OK, this fix restores the capability to go back to the story list, which is now blank, until you attempt to scroll that list, at which time, you are taken back to the top of the list, once again having to scroll through the stories to find where you were.

This fix is no fix.

Through the myriad of these errors (and others) I have not commented. However, this parade of bugs tells me that the authors are not bothering to test their software before foisting it on us.

(Note: This comment is from someone who used to write software for a living.)

WHIONews is pretty terrible to be honest(except in the seldom instances that it does want to work properly), if I wanna check WHIONews for local news? Crash. If I just get a notification for a news story and wanna check it immediately? Crash. Ceased reading up on news for a quick second to multitask another app but plan to return? Crash. Crash. I’m crashing! I’m crashing! Good lord they really need to adjust the amount of bugs in WHIONews. Due to these minor mishaps that can easily be fixed it causes WHIONews as a whole to be virtually unusable. I’m better off just watching my local news on television than trying to make sense of this apps complete incompetence.

I have trusted your station my entire life, so naturally I am frustrated at your news app....I really expected much more from the leader in news coverage.
Even after you did the upgrades, WHIONews freezes or crashes almost every time you go from a news story back to the home page. There is no proof-reading being done...spelling and punctuation errors appear in almost every story. The same news story will show up in two or three different categories, and some stories will “hang around” for a week or longer. With the rich history of this organization, I expect better than this, and apparently so do a lot of other people who have tried to use WHIONews.

So, the only reason I got WHIONews was to see if my school had a delay or was closed. I changed all the settings so only closings and delays were to be a notification, but I get most, if not all, of the notifications. I also have a problem with when I check the closings and delays it shows my school as a delay or closing, but I don’t get a text notification about it for about 2 hours later. For example, today my school is closed, I only knew this because my dad texted me, not because WHIONews did. I got that text 2 hours later, so if my dad didn’t text me, I would be standing, waiting for the bus for a while. Please fix this.

Version 7.1.0 has changed to really drain battery power. Although I have set WHIONews options to never use Location Services, never permit Siri searches, and not to run in the Background, if I've used WHIONews then let the phone sit unused at all over the hour, battery power will drop 3 to 4 percent. Battery Health reports the usage is due entirely to WHIONews running in the background - even though I have background running turned off for it. I have no idea if this is a mistake or they're running ads behind the scenes, but an app that does this isn't an app I'll keep using.

Two big issues. First, you cannot share an article with a friend or family member via any posting source. When I see something of importance, most sites allow for the sharing of the information. Second, several articles are grossly out of date. Some sports info can be a couple weeks old. I have complained about this a few times, apparently falls on deaf ears. Wish there was a “no star” option.

WHIONews is consistently getting worse. Stories appear multiple times on the hon screen under different headings, sometimes even right below one another. The amount of spam ads and click bait is absurd. I would think WHIO would do a better job at betting this, but for a news organization that can’t even spell words correctly or even use the correct words, this really doesn’t surprise me. Stories remain on WHIONews for literally months before they are removed, nothing is ever updated on the weekend (because, as we all know, nothing ever happens on the weekend 🙄) and now the share button has been removed. What is even the point of WHIONews? It’s probably a better experience just visiting the webpage from the browser on your phone.

A lot of the most important information is routed OUT of the application forcing me to use safari to listen to WHIO Radio, telling me to listen for a specific element which has ALREADY BEEN DISCUSSED and have to scroll to find. I didn't click to listen to the radio! Half of what’s written into the application to summarize the reports contains misspelled words, poor grammar and the like. How hard is it to proofread before pressing submit? Above all, WHIONews will give you an option to watch a video for some of the stories, but not before listening to an advertisement that you can’t mute or skip.

Stop sending out notifications for stories that can’t be found browsing WHIONews . I’ll get a notification for a story that I’m actually interested in reading so I’ll tap it. WHIONews may or may not crash. If so, it would be nice if I could find the story within WHIONews by browsing. Maybe if a notifications tab were included within WHIONews that listed notifications that we have received so we can recall them later.

I receive a notification of a news story, open WHIONews , and that story is nowhere on the site. Today, when I couldn’t find it I completely closed off WHIONews , re-opened it, and it still wasn’t there; 30 minutes later I unsuccessfully tried again. I looked at these ridiculous clips labeled event 1 and event 2 which were just screen shots promoting your newscast, you couldn’t find an actual story to put there?

I think WHIONews is just okay. It seems there are always frequent misspellings, shouldn’t spellcheck should correct this? I also noticed that the same news is posted for long periods with sometimes no new news or updates so I have to look at other news apps for updated news. Thanks for your consideration.

The last update removed the “back” button from the navigation menu.

When you are reading a story you have to use the home button to get back to the main menu which takes you to the top of the home page.

Add the “back” button to the navigation menu.

This most recent update was supposed to make it easier to navigate, but they removed the back button from the articles. Now, you either have to swipe through articles you are not interested in, or hit home, which takes you back to the beginning of the list. Bring back the back button in the article!

It crashes which is irritating but it also just randomly stops sending push notifications which can be a safety issue if you are counting on WHIONews for important news. For example. Tonight we suddenly have a water boil advisory and WHIONews didn’t send the push notification for that breaking news to my phone. Very irresponsible on their part.

Now WHIONews tells me that it can't start, and to check my network connection. Network connection is just fine. Deleted and redownloaded WHIONews . Still the same error message. Clicking on App Support just brings me to the dreaded 404 page not found error.

Update:. After I posted this I waited until I saw that a new version was available and tried it. It worked for a few weeks, but when the next update came, I got the same error all over again. Including the ,404 error when I click pin App Support in the as possible store. That is it for me. WDTNs app works consistently.

WHIONews takes a little longer to download but it’s not a bad app. I really enjoy the fact that it’s free and although the news is repetitive; if you’ve missed something which sometimes I do, you can definitely see it again-the same thing you missed earlier. I kinda see it as a bonus.

It gives you the straight news without the liberal slide. Just tell the news not their personal opinion. The weather is good. I trust them more than any of the other local forecasts.

I don’t like watching the news around my boys anymore. I don’t want them worried about things they are too young to even think about so I watch it on my phone via the WHIO app. I really like it except in the mornings if you use the listen button you get the radio station instead of the news that is on tv. Other than that it’s great!

Change it!! The virus background is bad!
It’s depressing now to see the same thing day in and day out now!!
We need it to be different.
Also can we get more positive news about good things happening during this extremely stressful time??? Good news will lift up depressed hearts and minds.
Thank you!!!!

With the Jan 2020 update the developers forget to put the back button in. So when you read a story you have to hit the home button. Now you have redone WHIONews and put in the back button but it is no different than hitting the home button. Still have to scroll all the way back down to where you left off. Waste of time. Put the old version back up

Whoever is the team is that gets to determine what news is worthy of notifications need to re-evaluate what news is. Also videos never load. They want to monetize the videos with their own ads but they never load, I haven’t been able to play a whole video from WHIONews in over a year. It so poorly designed and filled with click bait ads that lead to fake news stories.

With the recent update, the back arrow disappeared. This arrow allowed a quick return to the main stories at the place you left off, after you were done reading the details. Now the only way to get back to the stories is by using the home option. This takes me back to the beginning each time and I have to scroll back to where I was each time. Other then this, I real like WHIONews .

WHIONews at one point was good. Now it’s just plain dreadful. You’ll have stories in Latest News and then you'll repeat the same article in the Local News, and if the story makes National News you’ll repeat the whole story again. There’s no reason to repeat the story more then once.

Another thing when you click on the article to read, it’ll load and the size is super small no matter what you have the settings set at under Look & Feel size. I’ll give it another month or so.

A lot of the most important information is routed OUT of the application forcing me to use safari to listen to WHIO Radio, telling me to listen for a specific element which has ALREADY BEEN DISCUSSED and have to scroll to find. I didn't click to listen to the radio! Half of what’s written into the application to summarize the reports contains misspelled words, poor grammar and the like. How hard is it to proofread before pressing submit? Above all, WHIONews will give you an option to watch a video for some of the stories, but not before listening to an advertisement that you can’t mute or skip.

See lots of advertisements on the 7 news for WHIONews and thought I would give it a try. Waaay too many adds. Cannot click on anything without getting a 15 second video add. Already removed WHIONews . Sad they have to monetize so heavily. Otherwise WHIONews wouldn’t be too bad. Having adds in an app is a fine balance and this went too far.

I used to love WHIONews. A couple weeks ago the live traffic and traffic incidents section stopped working. They usually have a section to click for traffic updates, but that isn't always up-to-the-minute either. They need to update WHIONews and fix traffic section.