Financial Times

The layout on my iPhone, iPad, and iPad mini is excellent. The only complaint is that I often come across gated links to FT articles on Twitter and the web but there is no way to automatically open the story in the app and access with my subscription. The New York Times has this feature for its app. With the FT, it’s necessary to open the app and attempt to locate the article manually. Otherwise, a superb app and newspaper.

This app and the FT site doesn’t allow paid subscribers who need to use these articles as sources for academic or scholarly research to save full text articles to organizers like Pocket or Evernote. As such the FT subscription is worthless. Other major news publications allow subscribers to save full text articles for future reference and use as source materials. A serious scholar or researcher needs to be able to keep full text articles from various publications on specialized topics in one folder or location. The way things ate at present, a subscriber has to log on to the FT app or website, then go to a different site, location or folder to compare or supplement the information in the FT article with that of articles from other publications like The Economist or Bloomberg. This is a huge nuisance indeed. New regulations are needed to stop FT from engaging in this monopolistic practice.

The app recently disabled sharing of articles on the app; I now have a small number of ‘share credits’ I can use or buy more at cost. This prevents me from tweeting content to others. I don’t see the sense in that, and FT didn’t inform me in advance. I will reconsider my FT subscription when up for renewal because of it. But otherwise the app is good.

Every time I open this app in the morning, I have to log in again. FWIW I log in using Google. Often in the afternoon or evening, I have to log in /again/. While the app is aggressive about pulling stories down for an offline edition (a genuine utility for my subway commute), this means I absolutely need to be connected to data the first time I open the app. At this point, that’s resulted in my having a little chore every morning off logging in as I walk to the subway. Otherwise. FT’s coverage is what it is, and the app design is fine — nothing revolutionary, but it works.

Been a long time subscriber and love the newspaper. I usually read on the website on desktop or phone, after trying the app I decided to stay with the website. The app basically delivers the website version in compact, however it feels inflexible. I wish I can change the sequence of sections by my preference. Also the interface lacks natural effect, which feels a bit inconvenient for the thumbs.