Being a daily user of the Straits Times app, I am extremely peeved by how lousy the app is. For one thing, it crashes frequently - I would estimate around 3 times a week? But what really drives me nuts is its advertisements.
I have no issues with advertisements - as long as it doesn't hinder the reading experience. The app, however, seems to utilise the age-old "IN-YOUR-FACE" method of displaying ads. As you browse through the articles by swiping, a full-page ad will appear, and you will need to swipe it away. By itself, it is still not too irritating, but Singapore Press Holdings (SPH) obviously doesn't want to leave it at that. Some ads cannot be swiped away - you would need to tap the X button (which is not always located at the top right). Some ads need to be swiped in order for the user to interact with it - so instead of shoving it away, you end up being engaged involuntarily with the ad. And to top it up, swiping away the ads sometimes swipes away one or two pages of the newspaper too, such that you end up skipping one page of articles, sometimes unknowingly.
Recently, pages in the articles also become blank. When you go to the second page of the article, nothing appears, and you would need to close the article and open it again to try again. Which of course doesn't work all the time. There was once I tried around six times before the text in the second page appeared.
But I finally found a simple way to solve all the advertising issues. Just two magical words - Airplane Mode. Once this is engaged, all ads disappear - and so do all the technical issues related to the ads! So what I do now is to access the app for it to download the articles, then I turn on airplane mode. My reading experience has since improved exponentially.
No comments:
Post a Comment