The Dallas Morning News App Reviews

I downloaded TheDallasMorningNewsApp and paid for a subscription specifically so I could read Dallas Morning News (DMN) articles in Apple News. I really like the DMN journalism team and am willing to pay for their excellent local work. Even though I thought $5.40/month was high (w/tax), I was willing to give it a shot. But in Apple News any article from DMN wants me to sign up for an additional subscription to view the article. I guess they expect me to close out of Apple News and then go find the same article in the DMN app. Well that is not going to happen.

I contacted DMN and they offered no assistance at all, instead telling me to talk to Apple. Of course, Apple told me to talk to the developer and even included a link to TheDallasMorningNewsApp support site from DMN, which is a dead link, both from the Apple support email and from the iTunes App Support button under the DMN app. They care so little about supporting their users that the support link does not even work!

I canceled my subscription, got a refund from Apple for the first month, and am deleting TheDallasMorningNewsApp from all my devices. What a waste of effort.

TheDallasMorningNewsApp is functional but needs work. The available stories are poorly arranged on the hodgepodge homepage and, whether reading from an iPad or iPhone, the story text is small and not particularly readable. There’s a reason publishers typically print long strings of text—like a book or newspaper story—in a serif typeface, sans serif is for titles or short strings of text. With respect to interface there are other issues, to switch to another story the reader must return to the home page and find it. And more importantly, scroll too fast through a story—even the beginning—and it will shoot to another story, in fact it’s very difficult to scroll at all on a large screen without inadvertently loading the next story, and when this (frequently) happens you must return to the homepage to find the story you were trying to read in the first place. In sum, DMN could take some lessons from the Wall Street Journal and New York Times apps. Both are far superior.

If you enjoy navigating a news website, you’ll probably find TheDallasMorningNewsApp ok. It replicates that experience pretty well. Of course, I can’t imagine WHY anyone wold enjoy that experience.

But, if you’re used to getting your news from a printed newspaper or e-reader, you’ll find TheDallasMorningNewsApp cumbersome and unfriendly.

A few key weaknesses:

- There is no indication of which articles you’ve read!

- You can’t filter articles by date (or any other useful parameter). Why can’t I just view what’s in today’s paper… or at least what has been published since I last opened TheDallasMorningNewsApp ?

- There is no search function.

- When viewing any article page, the scrolling function is buggy. As you get to the end of the page, it often jumps to the next article before you can read the end of the current one.

- The ads within the menus really interrupt the navigation. And given that I’m already paying to use the service, I’m not sure why I have to be assaulted by even more advertising.


If this were a free app, I might let these issues pass. But I’m not going to give my hard-earned money to a product that is just so frustrating to use.

TheDallasMorningNewsApp completely frustrates me. I also get the actual paper edition of the Dallas morning news and I can’t seem to find the same stories in the online app that I find in the paper. There are sections, but for example, no section for international news. There is no search bar that I could find so you can’t look for a certain story on TheDallasMorningNewsApp or for a certain topic. You can only look at the stories that DMN wants you to read. It is a completely different news source than the physical paper. It’s as if this on-line News is run by a different organization altogether. Maybe that is by design but I find that I have no use for TheDallasMorningNewsApp.

The mobile site is worlds beyond what this basic app is. TheDallasMorningNewsApp layout is too basic, the homepage feed is like a bad version of Instagram. Internal links pointing to other DMN articles send you to a mobile browser and force you to log in again to view. I also need options to customize news notifications from different categories I care about. Come to think of it, I hardly get any breaking news push notifications from TheDallasMorningNewsApp. I see more AP News notifications coming in from their app. Very disappointing app user experience from a paid monthly member.

I concur with other users of TheDallasMorningNewsApp. It is quite jumpy and having to go back to the home screen to find another article is a pain. It doesn’t log what I have read and sometimes the home screen gets mucked up upon return or reorganizes the articles...leaving me to wonder where I left off.

I pay a subscription fee for both the paper and digital copies of this newspaper. I should have the ability to turn ads off. I HATE ads in apps. They completely ruin the experience.

I do like the font face.

I'm a digital reader; I love reading the extremes so I can make my opinion of facts. So I read WSJ, FT, etc. International also include Le Monde; Corriere de la Sera; El Tiempo; etc. I do spend a little fortune having digital access.

Locally I include the DMN. The digital print edition is perfect; it's been adequately designed to allow enlarging of snippets. The main problem with DMN it's too liberal. There have been 40 killings in March 2019, and they hide nationalities of both victims and perpetrators.

However, they have spent significant real state on crimes on LGBTQ; two cases cover 80% of the paper. What about the other? Why is this so critical? Those people were not killed because they were transgender, but that's what the newspaper wants you to believe.

There is much worse than crimes on a couple of transgender prostitutes.

The DMN is THE major newspaper in one of the most important cities in the U.S., but TheDallasMorningNewsApp makes it look like a small-town paper. Not very many stories appear here, and very little beyond local news. Click on the “World” news app, and the most recent stories posted are months old. It only takes a few minutes to go through this disappointing app. The one shining star here is Robert Wilonsky, an amazingly insightful and talented writer whose columns are always worth reading, always informative, always memorable. But as a whole, with all its talent, this newspaper—and its app—could do a lot better.

This is the most frequently visited app on my iPhone 6s. I love the content; however TheDallasMorningNewsApp has never felt stable over all the years I have used it. I will often click on a story, TheDallasMorningNewsApp will freeze up....and then I get “the white screen of death,” a blank white screen. From there I have to close TheDallasMorningNewsApp and go through a hard re-boot of my phone before I can read stories again. Now, with the newest version, after I read and go back the the main page, the screen jumps around for 3-4 seconds as it re-orients itself back to where I left off. Again, I really love the stories and will continue to use it, but the software has always made for a poor user experience.

You can email the link to a story, but unlike most newspaper apps, the title of the article is NOT automatically placed in the email Subject heading. OK, so you think you can just copy and paste it. But then the title generated in the email has hyphens-placed-between-every-cotton-picking-word-like-this. It seems to be operating off of an MS-DOS file naming convention from the 1980s. Did I mention that they still have not fixed the flagging “feature”? Why not remove it, since it never works?

TheDallasMorningNewsApp is my second news app, apart from Newsy. It’s simple to use and easy to navigate. The ads aren’t overwhelming, they fit nicely into the flow of things, and I have yet to accidentally tap one. The stories are well written, informative and well read. The push notifications are perfect for quick access with the user in mind. Excellent app for the quick tap reader.

DMN is my go-to news app but I have not been able to open it for over a week (on various WiFi connections and LTE). Before it stopped working altogether it frequently would not load if connected to WiFi. I’m paying for a subscription that I can’t access. Not to mention they haven’t updated TheDallasMorningNewsApp in over 2 months.
Get it together.

Haven’t experienced any of the jumpiness others have complained about (the website is another story.). App is super easy to navigate, it’s like reading the morning paper on my phone, which is exactly what I was hoping it would be. There are a few ads but not anymore than you’d see in a newspaper, and they are not intrusive or disruptive to my experience.

Thanks for the opportunity to vent! Have you ever thought about letting subscribers comment directly ( meaning on that page) on the published article? So often, I want to comment about yet another shallow, superficial article, but I seemingly must write aletter to the editor to do this. Please give your subscribers more opportunity to respond to your shallow evaluations of our current reality.

First thing after I get up and I love to read my paper to catch up with all the news . I travel for business and I considered Dallas paper is the best beside USA Today. Also I am so impressed about how this paper involved to help out local people. Please keep up with all your hard work and thank you.