This App Will Kill The Vancouver Sun

If newspapers are going to survive the transition from print to electronic media, it is imperative that they create a compelling, easy to use, reliable app. The Vancouver Sun app falls well short of what is needed for survival.

I have been a print subscriber for years. I have had and tried sporadically to use this app for a few years. I have now cut the print subscription back to Fridays and Sundays and need to get this app usable. So far I have failed, despite the fact that I work on computers professionally.

The first and most significant problem is logging in.

There is no indication of whether or not I am logged in. Most news apps will provide this and a little social bonding by saying something like "good morning joe, here is your news for today".

I have hunted all through the app looking for a place to login. No luck. The only way to login is to wait for 10 articles to expire and then be prompted. If I know the account password has changed, I want to login now and not wait for the app to balk.

When I am finally prompted, it wants me to use my Press+ account. My wife manages the subscription, so I ask her for the login name and password. She knows the login name, but has forgotten the password. So we reset the password. She is now living on her 10 article limit and I still dont have a way to enter the new password.

Oh you want to change the password to something that can be remembered? Sorry, there is no way to do that.

You want to use the online help to figure these problems out. Sorry, the online help is trivially obvious information masquerading as a FAQ (as if this stuff is _ever_ asked).

The above difficulties have been so annoying I have considered deleting the app. Instead I just use a less troublesome news web site.

Suppose however you persevere.

I started the app up for the first time in a couple of weeks. It says it has updated and is showing todays date on the top. Unfortunately all of the displayed articles are the same ones from the last time I used the app. Two week old news. Great. The articles are not dated, so unless you have been keeping track of the news on say a competitors web site, you might not realize you are reading old news.

Finally to add that last bit of insult to injury, I go looking for the comics. As everybody knows, except the Vancouver Sun apparently, the comics are the single most important part of the newspaper. After you have finished reading the normally depressing news, you need that little lift to remind yourself that maybe the human race might beat the odds and survive. Sorry, no comics. I guess the human race and the Vancouver Sun are not going to survive after all.

rw9182 about Vancouver Sun, v3.3