The Wall Street Journal Application

I received the Kindle Fire in November and started my subscription to the WSJ in early January. The initial D/L and the app itself seemed to “stick” and was slow to D/L. Frankly, I was disappointed. I then got the updated version of the WSJ app and still was not happy until I removed the app, and then reinstalled it. (Guess the old app and the new one were competing). Now the App D/L the WSJ editions fine and is very responsive and readable. I have been using (updated and reloaded) it for the past two days and have used the WSJ “Now” version, which gives you the latest news, – not jsut what is in the conventional paper section. In fact, as I write this the 5pm edition is available. The Fire version of the WSJ is easy to navigate and read the various sections of the paper. Great app, and a great paper. In short, I am very satisfied with the app, as well as the “paper”

Update November 3, 2014: WSJ has apparently rewritten this app. I found this out when my existing one would not work at all, so I de-installed it and reinstalled it. (This is what I have had to do in the past when the app stops working altogether.)

I didn’t think it was possible for WSJ to make things worse, but they have succeeded spectacularly. This new app is really the pits.

1. It does not store the issue in a way that you can read it offline. Except for the first few articles, most of them require you to have an active internet connection at the time of reading in order to view them. No photos are downloaded — you must always have an active wi-fi connection to see them.

2. Even though I am a WSJ subscriber and am logged in, every time I open the app my reading is interrupted by ads from Amazon inviting me to subscribe at an inflated per-month rate.

3. The old app, at least, allowed me to read in my preferred landscape orientation. The new app forces you to use portrait. I hate this because I can’t prop my Kindle open on a tabletop in that orientation.

I am almost certainly going to cancel my WSJ subscription. I primarily rely on digital delivery to read the publication, and now that WSJ has so thoroughly ruined this platform there’s no point in continuing the subscription.

Congratulations to the wizards at the Wall Street Journal for creating such an unusable app. Unless you want to read the paper edition, you might as well abandon the WSJ altogether.

———-

Update Jan. 25, 2014: This app has gone from bad to worse. I completely reformatted my Kindle Fire HD (reset to factory default) in order to clear up some available memory, and reinstalled this app from scratch. It sort of worked for about one day, but now won’t do anything. It will not download today’s paper or any earlier papers. I tried the “clear data” suggestion appearing in one of the reviews, and that didn’t seem to help either.

This app is completely useless. It is not horrible when it works, but it never works. Yes, the app is free, but the subscription to digital content is not. The WSJ people should be completely ashamed of themselves. This thing is a lemon, and gets worse with time rather than better.

———-

Update Jan. 4, 2014: I have demoted my rating from two stars to one because this application simply cannot be kept working. Believe me, I would very much like to have it work, because I would prefer to get away from having paper copies of the WSJ delivered. But this app is too unstable and too unreliable to take a place as my sole source of reading the WSJ.

The problems with it, as noted before, involve its refusal to update itself as new editions of the paper come out. As I write this update, on January 4, 2014, the newest edition showing on my Kindle Fire HD is the December 31, 2013 issue. I cannot get it to download and display any of the issues from 2014.

Historically, I have been able to “wake up” this app by removing it from the device and reinstalling it. This becomes a major inconvenience after a while, and in my opinion there’s no excuse for this level of inconvenience.

Another significant problem with this add is that even when the home page indicates that a full issue has been downloaded, there will still be a significant number of articles where a headline is displayed but there is no content. This is particularly true on the “Now” edition, which is supposed to have the latest updates. For the most part, these “updates” deliver only blank screens.

Evidently the WSJ folks do not put any priority on making this app work. I don’t know whether it’s this bad on a pure Android device, but on the Kindle Fire HD it is a waste of space. The Wall Street Journal folks need to lift a finger and correct the coding on this app so that it will work for more than a few days after installation. It is pretty much a complete failure in its current form.

I have some other nits to pick about the organization and presentation of the digital content — primarily the fact that when you get to a new section, you have to click through to an article on the front page before you can see the index of all articles in that section — but those concerns are irrelevant when I can’t see any content at all.

I want to stress that this is a vanilla Kindle Fire HD with no great number of apps on it and no other tinkering. The WSJ should work, without having to delete and reinstall it every week. It doesn’t. Hence the one-star rating.

————————————

I’m not sure whether the problem is with this app, or with the WSJ’s servers. Whatever the cause, this app fails to update its “Now” edition most of the time. You cannot reload it most of the time. it presents you a blank screen most of the time.

I have removed and reinstalled this app twice now. This sometimes helps, for a brief time, but it doesn’t solve the problem in a meaningful way.

I have tried both WSJ and Amazon customer service, and no one seems to know what’s going on.

If all you want is the “frozen” daily edition, the app works OK. I’m not crazy about the navigation, but it’s livable. For those who want to stay more up-to-date, however, this app is a failure.