TechCrunch

For an app that reports tech related news, this app fails to do what other simple news apps have been doing for a while. The app never shows any picture in the article aside for the main cover photo. The app fails to load some pages instead giving a totally blank page with nothing to read. If an article has any video it won’t be included here. Most of the time you have to click on content (i.e a picture) that doesn’t load and it’ll direct you to the web version of the article. So essentially it’s a glorified web browser at that point. It’s funny when articles reference to an image that won’t even load on the app. Love to skim through the content here but I don’t get why it’s got to be so hard to get the content.

The native iOS app is simply a complete downgrade from the mobile web experience. The most glaring flaw is the fact that on the app, there are no images or videos in the articles. This is incredibly frustrating when you read an article with the with the title “watch this _video tour_ of...” and the article neither contains a video or even the courtesy of a direct link to the web client so I can watch the video. I love the content and the writing, but this app really falls short of expectations and honestly, I can get all the tech crunch articles I want from Google News, and their mobile app renders web versions so I can actually see the videos when I read. It just feels like the native app is an afterthought and something tech crunch is doing out of perceived obligation rather than a genuine attempt at creating a usable platform. Please fix this TC, I can’t think of any other media app that strips all visual media from its content. When the mobile web client is better than the native app, something is really wrong.

I find tech crunch a wonderful way to keep up on technology news. The content is pretty top-notch. This app, unfortunately, does not do that content justice. The advertisements can be intrusive at times. I'm a big fan of the daily crunch report video (since it is a convenient way to catch up on the news over my lunch break), but I've been unable to access any videos on TechCrunch for over a year. I can navigate to the specific video, but then I just get a black screen that perpetually says loading video. Data point: videos work fine from web browser such as Google Chrome.

I use the TechCrunch app multiple times per day. It works, but it's far from perfect. The biggest problem is that certain article types (slideshows, etc.) can't be viewed in the app, the article just displays as blank. I also experience crashes at least once a week. On a separate note, the stories seem to be getting more political in nature by the day. It sometimes can be frustrating having to look through multiple highly political editorial pieces before getting to an actual news story.

I have always enjoyed reading the stories here. They are well written and I enjoy finding stories that aren’t on Engadget to stay up-to-date on Technology. But, the app is buggy and the photo content never loads after clicking on a story. I get lucky if the story actually loads and it isn’t just a white screen. I hope I will download the app in a year and it’s improved. But, for now it only works half the time and I’ll just have to find my news elsewhere.