San Francisco Chronicle App Reviews

Ive downloaded it multiple times, after deleting it multiple times, and it is still just flashing on and then crashing bad! Ugh!!!

Update #3, 04/2016: The Chronicle app continues to be close to unusable. Initial load times have improved, but at the cost of long wait times - 2 minutes to a staggering 5 minutes or never - to change sections or open articles. Ive taken to clicking an article to read, going over to my PC and doing a Google search on the news item, finding it and reading it, then coming back to my iPad to see if the Chron app has been able to open it yet. Usually it hasnt. And this is with very high speed internet and a strong connection! Oh and sometimes after selecting the article you wish to read and waiting for it to open, the homepage refreshes instead and the article is no longer even linked from the landing page. In an area with hot and cold running UI designers, how can the Chron continually get it so wrong? What an ongoing disaster of an app!

This is absolutely the worst app - for a newspaper in the heart of the global technology revolution to produce an App so bad, it is beyond the point of lame excuses. Worse yet, I just got billed for an entire year and I cannot even open it. The reporters ought to do what the Boston Globe is doing - they should be demanding that their app builders fix this thing. This is a scandal.

After weeks of trying to read even a single article, I sadly have to cancel this app and my subscription. I can open 5-10 NY Times articles and the SF Chronicle continues to spin into oblivion. It wasnt always like this and I hope they will fix this problem soon! I enjoy having local news to read but this is absurd!

...unless you dont mind waiting for 5 minutes for anything to happen. A shame.

Unbelievably bad app a few of the major problems: -mixes old news with new, i.e, repeating old news in the new edition for several days -no search tool for archives -very slow loading -frequently crashes Also, I prefer a facsimile of the print edition. I regret having renewed my subsciption and wont make that mistake again.

The old version was better than the new version, which is not saying much. Obituary section is blank every day...did people stop dying in the Bay Area? Mixes stale old stories with new stories. Given SF is in the tech center of the world, it really is sad how pathetic this app is. If you compare this to what the NY Times uses, its night and day. We stick with it because the morning newspaper delivery service became so unreliable we were hardly ever getting a delivery. The online "Olive" version is impossible to navigate. It could be so much better. This is the death knell of the Chronicle.

It is hard to imagine what the strategy is at Hearst Publishing. Their industry is on the ropes with dwindling subscriptions and a late attempt at joining the 21st century with this app. I am a 30 year subscriber who has struggled to maintain loyalty for the past 5 years. Hearst has finally made the decision for me with this app . . . I am done! After mostly working as expected for months I am now caught in an endless loop being treated as a new user every time I attempt to run the app. After each login Im greeted with "congratulations start reading". When I select the first article it throws me back to the "choose a subscription". Technical support was useless - I has to told me over a week ago that they would have my issue addressed within "24 to 48 hours". Dont bother.

Horribly slow. Bizarrely mixes old and new articles.

App still crashes every time I try to open it. Uninstalled and reinstalled, but still crashes.

It was handy when my newspaper was not delivered, but I need to read the paper when I am not connected to the internet. Currently, there is no way to know when the entire paper has been loaded into my iPad.

I actually liked the app before they changed it. It looked like the paper & it was easy to go to articles. Also, I would catch up on days I missed. If there is a way to see previous issues, I cant find it! Bring back the old format! I hate this one.

Poor layout, very few new articles posted each day. Hard to distinguish between daily editions. Poor discrimination between old and new stories. I really miss the old app.

App does not deliver all of SF Chron. The obits do not load - why not? And Cannot do searches or see past issues. I am full subscriber....very disappointing.

Loved old app with format mirroring print edition. I liked it and was willing to pay for a subscription as I viewed it as a substitute for a hardcopy. New format appears to mirror SFgate website - which is free to view. Why should I pay for the app access? By the way, the new website/app format is terrible as compared to the old app. If read on a daily basis, you must dig through stale content to find anything new.

The old version used to be full of bugs but the content was great. Now the content is repetitive, there are a couple of new stories per day but the rest is old. All I want is an electronic version of the newspaper, with the same content and refreshing news everyday.

I have always loved reading the Chron for my local news and yet I feel cheated lately. I feel however that the pages are too cluttered and Im oftentimes directed to advertisements and thats annoying. The same news appears repeatedly for days and Im have been losing interest after 40 years of being a loyal Chron customer. My favorite app structure for news is the layout of the New York Times....why cant they just copy that format? Even the movie reviews have no rating..where did the little man go?..and Michael Bauers reviews cant show stars? The advertisements are still like minefields. So sad....spent some money Chron and get it right!!!

I cant believe you have to have a current subscription to have this app. Why advertise it for free in the App Store? Guess Ill go find another one that is for free and SFGate can find another sucker. Guess money is more important than loyalty. All good.....

Shockingly terrible redesign. I cant believe you found a way to take a bad app and actually make it LESS usable. Dont you have any UI people on staff? Were I not a decades-long Chronicle subscriber and vey much a fan of their writing staff and content, Id never use this app. Just horrible. Im now seriously considering going back to the print version or only reading SF Gate.

Cant even open the app anymore. Crashes every time I try to.