Boston Herald

Review by eFreeware

Keeping up with a city means checking several places: a homepage, a couple of sections, maybe a column or two you always read. The Boston Herald app from MediaNews Group is built to fold that routine into one place on your phone, with a feed you can shape around the topics you care about rather than scrolling through everything the newsroom publishes.

It has been on Google Play for a long time, released in October 2010, and the version described now is a rebuilt Android app rather than the one early adopters installed. The pitch is speed and tidiness: a native app with a top navigation bar, a personalized feed, saved stories and the day's paper in replica form.

It is free to install and supported by ads, with in-app purchases available. The average rating sits at 2.4 from 927 ratings, which is worth keeping in mind, and I'll come back to what that mix of features and feedback means for a typical reader.

Building a feed around your topics

The centerpiece is the Your News tab, which the developer describes as a way to bypass the noise and home in on the subjects you actually follow. You pick the topics you want to see, and the feed leans toward them instead of presenting the full daily output in publication order. For someone who reads a handful of beats closely, that is a more useful default than a chronological list.

Following works at the article level as well. Tap follow on a story and related articles gain relevance and appear more often; unfollowing is just as simple. Over time that should make the feed feel more like your own reading list and less like a generic front page.

The top navigation bar lets you switch sections by tapping or swiping, and a left swipe inside a section opens the next article without a trip back to the section front. These are small conveniences, but they are the kind of thing that decides whether a news app feels quick or tiresome on a daily basis.

Notifications follow the same logic. You choose which topics you want to be notified about, so alerts are tied to your interests rather than to whatever the newsroom decides is urgent. It's a sensible design for anyone who has ever turned off alerts entirely because they arrived too often.

Saved stories and the replica edition

Articles can be saved for reading later. Push notifications can remind you about saved items or suggest related pieces, which turns the saved list into something more active than a folder you forget about. If you tend to save long reads for the evening, that reminder can be the difference between reading them and losing them.

For readers who want the paper as it was laid out, the app includes E-News: a digital replica of the day's edition, reached through Settings. That is a genuinely different experience from a feed, with the page structure and story placement intact. Some people want exactly that on a tablet, and it saves opening a separate app for it.

Offline reading is also handled from Settings, where you can enable it and adjust reading preferences. The idea is that you can line up content in advance and read it later, which matters on a flight or anywhere signal is unreliable.

Taken together, these three features cover different reading moods: a personalized feed for skimming, a saved queue for later, and the replica edition for the full paper. That range is the strongest argument for installing this rather than relying on a browser.

The puzzles tucked into the app

Less expected is the games section. The app serves Sudoku, Solitaire, Jumble, Crossword and Puzzles, so a reader who finishes the news has something to do without leaving the app. For commuters, or anyone with a quiet ten minutes, that's a small bonus.

I wouldn't treat the games as the reason to install a news app, and they aren't presented that way. They sit alongside the reading experience as a diversion, and the crossword and Jumble in particular fit the habit of a print reader who expects a puzzle page with the paper.

It's an unusual combination, but not a confusing one: news first, puzzles second. It does round out the app for casual use.

What you need before you start reading

Using the app involves an account, since this version asks users to log in again. Subscribers are told to restore their account in Settings under Subscriptions so access continues without interruption. If you already pay for the Herald, that's the first thing to do after updating.

The app is free to download, carries ads, and offers in-app purchases. Subscriptions are offered, with a restore button, but the tiers and prices aren't spelled out, so I'd check the current options in the app before subscribing.

Offline reading and the E-News replica are both switched on in Settings, so a few minutes of setup pays off. The recent update also added an author view on articles and fixed a content-loading error.

On the numbers: the app has passed 50,000 installs and holds a 2.4 average from 927 ratings. That's a modest score for a long-running news app, and it's the main reason I'd suggest trying it before committing to a subscription.

Readers who will get the most from it

This is built for people who follow Boston closely and want Herald coverage in one place. If you read a few specific beats, the topic feed and follow feature do real work; if you want the paper as printed, the replica edition covers that too. Someone who checks local news several times a day is the natural user.

It also suits readers who like to save articles for later and want a reminder when they do. The combination of a saved queue, topic alerts and offline reading fits a routine of catching up in the evening or on a trip rather than reading everything as it lands.

The puzzle section widens the appeal a little further, particularly for anyone who grew up with a daily crossword. None of this is aimed at readers who want a broad national or international feed first; the app is organized around one city's paper, and that focus is the point.

A local news app worth trying, with caveats

The Boston Herald app covers the main jobs well: a feed you can personalize by topic, saved articles with reminders, a replica edition of the day's paper, offline reading, and games for the quieter moments. For a free download, that's a lot of ground, and the rebuilt native version sounds quicker than what came before.

The reservations are straightforward. Ads are part of the free experience, in-app purchases and subscriptions are present, and the 2.4 average from 927 ratings is low enough that I'd want to see how it performs on my own phone before paying for anything. Logging in again after the update is a minor chore, but an easy one.

My recommendation: install it if you're a Boston reader who wants Herald coverage, the replica paper and a saved-articles queue in one app, and give the free version a fair run before deciding on a subscription. If your news diet is mostly national, the app's local focus will feel narrow.

What's new in version 10.0.62

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