Financial Times: Business News 4+

Thank you and well done.

I take both the physical paper version as well as the digital version. Mainly because when I am reading the paper version I find things that I don’t always notice in the digital version. And the other way round at other times.

In whatever format I am reading I am always rewarded by the quality of the journalism. Fantastic opinion columns, backed up by exceptional prose. In addition to the impressively balanced approach to most of the general information articles as well.

Another observation that leaps out at me, is the incredibly wide international coverage that I am offered every morning. I am not sure that any other U.K. publication covers so many places in such depth.

Your “opinion” journalists should also be fully aware that I so enjoy their articles, that as soon as they publish a book on their specific subject I am an early buyer of the said book.

Please do your best to keep it up, and well done on all that has gone before.

Kindest regards
Keith

Excellent journalism, poor app experience

It’s a shame, I enjoy reading FT news for the quality of their articles but the app is a let down. I would say it does the bare minimum of letting me see recent news and read an article, but fails to engage me further. Unfortunately its quality of experience is far from matching the standard that I’d expect for a £50/month subscription.

Besides randomly crashing, basic things like refreshing the articles aren’t done right - why is it a tab on your menu? All socials and news app use pull to refresh feature. These decisions add clutter to the experience and make it less convenient and enjoyable to use. The top stories page is cluttered and it’s hard to spot articles based what you’re interested in. The app also doesn’t seem to learn as I use it to recommend me personalised content. Finally there is no way to sign up on the app too, making me wonder why I shouldn’t stick to the web experience instead.

Working in tech myself, I may be more irritated by these than other users but all in all, I think poor product decisions were made here. There’s a long way to go for this app to offer a comprehensive and premium experience. Basically get your priorities straight!

Developer Response ,

Hi lucy_j44, we are very sorry that you are experiencing this issue. Please can you contact us at https://help.ft.com/ so that we can get more details and assist in trying to rectify this issue.

FT Online

Since moving abroad I have bitten the bullet and dropped my subscription for the written edition. What a relief! Like any quality broadsheet the physical FT was cumbersome and difficult to read to its full potential. The FT app is pretty intuitive to use and deftly takes advantage of its digital format by inserting cross references to related articles. It has a reasonably detailed contents sidebar and can also be customized. I read the FT mainly on iPhone but occasionally on my laptop, particularly when using the search function. The archive is extremely well stocked, it is easy to access, and the allowance of 20 gift articles per month is adequate given that each gift link can be accessed three times. Retrieved articles can also be printed. When I return to the UK I will stay online only with the occasional exception of the Weekend FT, which does benefit more from a hard copy format and which my wife enjoys browsing. All in all the best news app I use by a good margin. But there is a ‘but’. The FT is arguably the best newspaper in the world BUT is is horrendously expensive and therefore out of reach to many who would benefit from all it offers the privileged few.