Allentown - Morning Call

Review by eFreeware

The Morning Call is the daily paper for Allentown and the wider Lehigh Valley, and this Android app is Tribune Publishing's own way of putting that reporting on a phone or tablet. It is free to download and covers the ground you would expect: local news, sports, business and entertainment, alongside video and photo work from the newsroom. The pitch is a rebuilt reading experience that adapts to different screen sizes, and for anyone who already follows mcall.com, that is the main reason to give it a spot on the home screen.

What separates a newspaper app from a generic news aggregator is whose work you are reading. Here everything comes from one masthead, so the value depends on whether you care about that specific corner of Pennsylvania. If you do, the app is a direct line to it; if you don't, the topic list will feel thin. I'd approach it as a companion to a publication you already read rather than a general-purpose news source.

It has been on Google Play since January 2011, which makes it one of the longer-running local news apps around, and it was updated in September 2026. The install figure sits at over 10,000, and the average rating is 3.1 from 312 ratings. Those numbers suggest a settled, modest audience rather than a breakout hit, which is normal for a single-market paper.

A feed you assemble from topics

The feature worth starting with is the personalized news feed. You pick the topics that interest you and the app builds a stream around those choices, which is a meaningful difference from scrolling a single chronological front page. A reader who follows high school sports and local business but skips lifestyle coverage can weight the app that way and spend less time scrolling past things they will never open.

My expectation is that it behaves like most topic-based feeds: broad categories first, with the mix shifting as you add or remove interests. The appeal is that the app stops being a fixed front page and becomes something closer to your own edition of the paper.

This is also the part of the app that most rewards a few minutes of setup. Choosing topics deliberately at the start is likely to pay off more than accepting whatever the default selection happens to be, and revisiting those choices when your interests change keeps the feed useful.

Saving, sharing and the rest of the toolkit

Around that feed sits a set of supporting features. You can save stories, photos and videos to return to when you have time, which is the feature I'd lean on most: local reporting often runs long, and a saved queue is a better fit for that than trying to read everything the moment it publishes. The app also carries video and photo galleries the paper produces for the app itself, so some of what you find there won't be a straight copy of a print article.

Breaking news arrives through notifications pushed from the newsroom, which is the fastest route to a developing story and also the one most likely to interrupt you. Sharing is handled through AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook or email, so passing a story to a neighbor or a group chat takes a couple of taps. There is also quick access to the E-Newspaper edition, the digital replica of the printed paper, for readers who prefer the familiar layout and page order.

The most recent update added an author view to articles, which lets you see everything written by a particular byline, and fixed a message that could appear when content failed to load. Both are small changes, but the author view in particular is the sort of thing regular readers notice, since following a beat reporter is a common habit.

What it asks of you

The download is free, and the app carries advertising and offers in-app purchases.

There is one requirement that matters more than any of that: the app is built around The Morning Call's own output. Its usefulness is tied to whether you want Allentown-area news, sports, business and entertainment from that newsroom. The topic feed draws only from what the paper publishes.

The other thing to weigh is the rating. A 3.1 average across 312 ratings is not a ringing endorsement, and with 151 written reviews there is clearly a body of reader opinion behind it. I'd treat that as a reason to try the free download before committing to anything paid rather than as a verdict on the app's quality.

Getting the most from it day to day

The way I'd set this up is to treat the personalized feed as the front door and the saved list as the backlog. Choose topics that match what you actually read, let the feed surface those stories, and push anything long into the saved queue instead of trying to finish it on the spot. That combination is what makes a single-paper app worth opening regularly rather than only when something big happens.

Notifications deserve a deliberate decision. Breaking news alerts from the newsroom are genuinely useful when a story is developing, and less so when they arrive during a workday for something you would have read anyway. Turning them on for the categories you care about most, rather than leaving everything at full volume, is the sensible middle ground.

For readers who like the printed paper's structure, the E-Newspaper is the piece to try first, since it preserves the layout and ordering that a feed flattens out. And if you follow particular reporters, the new author view is a quick way to catch up on their recent work without hunting through sections.

A local paper in your pocket, for local readers

The Morning Call's Android app is a straightforward proposition: the paper's own reporting, shaped into a feed you control, with saved stories, alerts, sharing and the E-Newspaper alongside it. The rebuilt layout for different screen sizes and the September 2026 update suggest a product that is still being tended rather than left alone.

It suits people with a real connection to the Lehigh Valley, whether they live there, grew up there or follow its news for work. For that reader, a free app that pulls together the paper's news, sports, business and entertainment coverage, plus the digital edition, is an easy thing to install and evaluate. Anyone without that connection will find the topic list has little to offer them.

My advice is to download it, spend a few minutes choosing topics, and judge it against the 3.1 average over the first week or two. If the feed and the alerts line up with what you want to read, the app earns a permanent spot; if the mix feels off, the free download means you have lost nothing but the time it took to try.

What's new in version 10.0.62

Added new author view to articles Fixed inadvertent "unable to load this content" message