NBC News: Breaking & US News

One of the very best news apps. I prefer reading the news to watching it--this app allows both, and does both well. The widget provides constantly updating headlines when other apps, like the New York Times, have totally abandoned their iOS headline widgets. You can read top stories, including excellent coverage of issues of specific importance to LGBTQ and ethnic minority communities, watch video clips or the entire NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt. Richard Engel's coverage of international news, especially Syria and Ukraine, is unparalleled. There are ads, but they're not intrusive at all, unlike so many other news sites and apps that have become unusable, and there's no paywall. In this era of fake news and alternative facts, this app is a bastion of quality journalism.

It’s a nice way to get news and it’s free. But there NEEDS to be a way to search for articles. I frequently will have clicked on a notification to read an article and some problem causes me to go back to the home page of the app (sometimes I didn’t finish reading the article before spending an extended period of time with the app minimized, or sometimes when I click a notification it doesn’t actually take me to the article) but if the article isn’t on the home page and I don’t know where to find it in the explore tab, there’s no way for me to get back to it. This is less pressing, but it would also be nice if clicking links inside an article that lead to another NBC article would open up that article inside the app rather than in my browser.

The push notification options for this app appear to be “all or none”. There is one option in settings for “Breaking news”, another for “Quiet mode”. The problem is, I get tons of notifications for things that aren’t breaking news at all. Some are editorials (notification title starts with “OPINION:...”), others are non-breaking news stories: “Toddler's family grapples with 'unfathomable' loss after her fall from cruise ship”. The app needs a *real* “Breaking news only” push notification option. Until it does I’m about to turn off the app’s notifications because I get far too many non-breaking news notifications.

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There’s a lot of little things that are annoying. I have this on mobile, and it gets annoying. I can’t figure out how to search, so I can’t see anything but the past two days of news. It gets really annoying! I want to see stuff from the past, almost every other news app has this! It would also be nice to have subtitles on the videos. I don’t always have headphones with me, so it’s difficult to look at certain stories on the go. It would also make everything difficult for deaf people. Most everything else is great, the ads get annoying but it’s fine, gotta make money somehow I guess. Overall it’s an alright app, but these things start to get to you after a while.

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This app has one really annoying glitch. When I'm trying to read through the headlnes on the main news page, the app suddenly jumps, completely on its own, to somewhere else on the page. It may be up or down, but the headline I was looking at just disappears and the screen is centered in a new, random, place on the page. Then I have guess whether to scroll up or down to get back to where I was. If this is because the page was refreshed, please give us a button to do the refresh when the user wants it refreshed - don't aggravate the user by jumping away from what they were trying to read! Otherwise, the coverage seems to be very good. I just can't stand the way the app annoys me. If it didn't do that, I'd give it 5 stars.