This is purely and app review, not the content. The app doesn’t support dark mode, articles still show with bright white background even at night with dark mode enabled. This makes reading in the app at night with the lights off quite uncomfortable. Also, the app title bar constantly pops in and out in a way that feels “jenky” for lack of a better term. The title bar doesn’t flow nicely when scrolling. Lastly, I was disappointed that despite paying for a subscription, I still have to endure an add banner at the bottom of each article. All that said, content is great so keep up the good work to the writers. However, to the app developers, do better.

I received an NRPlus subscription (purchased on their website) as a gift, but couldn’t login to the website or this app. I sent emails that went unanswered. I made a phone call that got me an emailed password that didn’t work. I called again and finally got someone who could reset my account and give me access. On a positive note, they extended my subscription by a month to account for the month I was locked out. The app is simple and works well 99% of the time. On a few occasions I’ve switched between topic tabs and had the app refuse to load headlines, but closing the app and relaunching it has fixed that. Otherwise it just works. There’s one major annoyance that I wish NR’s developer would fix: if you want offline acces to stories (eg. if you’ll be flying and won’t have Wi-Fi) you have to load each story one by one, then the app will store the text. They really should add a button to download the text and images for all new content — and yes, probably also the ads that litter every story — so I can update the app in a few seconds instead of the several minutes that it takes now. Speaking of the content, National Review’s is top notch. If you want to read news reported as facts without a leftist bias, and you want to read opinion from a classical conservative perspective, then NR is the place to go. An NR subscription isn’t cheap, but it’s well worth the price.

I opened the app today to quite the shock. The app felt very modern, beautiful, a joy to navigate within, and simply wonderful. I’m sure the development cost behind this update was substantial, but thank you for the investment! Before it was often a better user experience to just visit the site through the browser, even though I was on my iPad. Now the experience is better on the app than the desktop. Thank you, thank you!