San Francisco Chronicle App Reviews

A pathetic app. Even more pathetic that an information company in the San Francisco Bay Area should find such substandard app developers.

I purchased a WiFi iPad Mini for the express purpose of using this App. And it met every single one of my needs, until they decided to release this horrible redesign. I travel a lot, and could stop at a Starbucks, use their Wi-Fi to download a few days of newspapers, then read them offline at the beach, on a cruise ship, at the gym, etc. That is no longer possible. First off there is no edition management. You can no longer switch between todays newspaper, or any of the past weeks newspapers. There’s “In Today’s Paper”, but that just seems to list the top 4-5 articles for a handful of sections. Second off it seems to be missing a lot of content. Where’s the Date Book, Auto section, Dear Abby, etc? Yes you can find them by using search if you have a connection, but they should also be available using the normal navigation and available for offline reading. Third, offline reading just doesn’t work well. I assume the red rectangle under Offline Reading is a progress bar, which seems to be marked to indicate complete, but after over 10 minutes on a 60Mbps connection, I still can’t read most articles under todays paper. Fourth, the app is just plain slow. If you’re like me and just want a copy of the physical paper on your iPad, like the previous version offered perfectly, then this update is completely unusable to you. It’s clear Product Management did not talk to actual customers about how they use the app. My advice would be bringing back the old version would be considered a huge upgrade.

Just spent 10 minutes writing a detailed review and it was discarded because my nickname was taken... Typical of the new Chron Terrible redo No support Repetitive content No sports scores Lost Sudoko Ill miss Nevius and Brown Im looking for a new daily read

Completely unusable. Login loop continually asks for authentication every few seconds, despite constantly entering correct information for app login. Unable to read or access any articles at all.

Agonizingly slow, poorly organized, visually chaotic, crashes regularly. This is a MAJOR step backwards from a perfectly functional, pleasant-to-use app. Oh how I wish I had the old version back!!

They reformatted the app. Horrible. Links dont work, pages freeze, and all the loggers like Mark Morford are gone. I have other subscription news apps and they dont have the glitches and freezes this app. So frustrating I just finally cancelled my subscription.

The user interface is acceptable but the app does poorly without Internet. The download and go feature did not work for me. And the NY Times app has no such need for this. The app froze on me yesterday with no net access. So they need to make it download and store content (perhaps minus pictures) for people on the go using a wi-fi only iPad! NY Times works ok w/o net connection but pictures limited. Why cant this? Needs work! Update : April 2016: Completely redesigned from the ground up... And its still terrible! In the center of techies, SF cant write an app that accurately displays the newspaper. Now it is organized by sections and such, but when I get my daily reminder of whats in the paper by email, I cant easily find that stuff in the App! I have to kill the app to get todays paper to refresh. Pix wont load properly. The bug list goes on... Please have a mode that looks like print or something close!

I could write several paragraphs about all the things that are wrong with this "upgrade", but the short of it is, it feels like what you get for free on SFGate.com. Why pay for a subscription then, if I cant read yesterdays, or last Sundays paper? If I cant "download and go"? Being that it is a newspapers official app, one would hope for some sort of correlation between the apps organization and the papers, but I guess that is just too much to ask for. I also pay for a Mexican newspaper ("El Norte"), and its really mind-boggling that they are able to offer a much more useful and enjoyable suite of apps to read the news than the biggest newspaper in the city that is universally considered to be at the forefront of the digital world. Embarrassing, really. Bye, Chron.

I find using this app very frustrating to use. If I have not had my morning coffee it is a big test of my patience. I read three other papers on my iPad and at least 3 magazines so I think I know a little about what the experience should be like. Specifics, it takes forever to load. With wifi or without just way too slow initially and when picking a specific article to read. It crashes less than the last version. Editorial has put "dummy text goes here" as a picture caption. Headlines get cut off but less than in the past. Wow. Lets get it right guys. I hear you do not use the Adobe product that most papers use. No, I do not work for Adobe. This really is the worst paper subscription experience I have had. I give it one star because I do still use it and I am able to read the paper with it. Save a tree.

I have plenty of time to write this because the app is still trying to bring up an article. The old version, the one that looked like a newspaper, worked fairly well. Ever since the update, its almost unusable. Click on an article and wait. Click on a section and nothing happens. If there were a way to go back to last version Id stay. Looking like Ill have to cancel. Dont waste your money.

Crashes regularly, takes FOREVER to open an article or a section. Did the Chronicle hire the old incompetent app developer of the last version or did management diligently find a new incompetent app developer to create this disfunctional new version? The app will certainly discourage new online subscribers.

Other papers seem to work fine in the Newsstand app. Why does the Chronicles crash constantly?

Terrible. Not shocking given that SFGate constantly crashes.

It just keeps getting worse. Now it takes over 10 minutes to load. A tragedy -