Citizen Times

Review by eFreeware

If you live in or keep ties to the Asheville area and want its newspaper on your phone, Citizen Times is the app built for that. It gathers the paper's local reporting, its photography and its video into one place, and it adds access to the USA TODAY eNewspaper plus more than 200 other local eNewspapers. For someone who follows Western North Carolina news closely, that combination is the main draw.

It is published by USA TODAY Co. and has been on Google Play since June 2012, with an update in late September 2026 that the developer describes as bug fixes and stability improvements. The install base is modest — over 10,000 — and the average rating sits at 2.9 from 147 ratings, which is worth keeping in mind before you commit to anything.

The app is free to download and carries ads, and it offers in-app purchases. Every user gets a sampling of free articles each month; beyond that, subscriptions are handled through Google Play and renew monthly or yearly unless you turn them off in your account settings at least 24 hours before the current period ends.

What you actually get day to day

The core of the app is reading. The developer says it carries the paper's in-depth journalism, covering things to do around town and sports from high school through the professional ranks, among other subjects. That is a broad local brief rather than a single beat, and it is the kind of coverage that only makes sense if you care about the area it serves.

The reading experience is pitched as streamlined and quick to load, which matters when you are checking headlines in a parking lot or between errands. Stories, photos and videos are all part of the package, and the photography is treated as a core part of the app rather than an afterthought.

Notifications are the other half of the daily routine. The app delivers breaking news, sports scores and weather alerts in real time, and the developer says these can be tailored to your interests. That tailoring is the feature I would look at first, because unfiltered alerts from a local paper can pile up quickly.

Reading it your way

There is a reasonable amount of control over how the app presents itself. You can save stories you want to come back to, change the text size, switch on night mode, and read offline. None of that is unusual for a news app, but together they cover the adjustments most people end up wanting after a week of use.

Night mode and text sizing are the sort of settings that decide whether a phone is a comfortable place to read a long feature, and offline reading is useful on a flight or anywhere the signal drops. Saving stories is the simplest of the four, and for anyone who reads in bursts rather than in one sitting it is probably the one that gets used most.

I would treat these as the practical layer of the app rather than its selling point. The reason to choose Citizen Times over a general news reader is the local reporting behind it, and the settings exist to make that reporting easier to consume.

The eNewspaper, and how far it reaches

The eNewspaper is the feature that separates this from a plain feed of articles. It presents the paper's print edition on a mobile device, so the layout and page order of the printed version are available on a phone or tablet. For readers who grew up with the print edition, that familiarity is often the deciding factor.

Access is not limited to the local title. The app also includes the USA TODAY eNewspaper and more than 200 other local eNewspapers, which widens its usefulness considerably for anyone who moves between markets or follows news in more than one city.

That breadth is genuinely unusual for a single newspaper's app, and it is the part of the package I would weigh most heavily if you are comparing it with a dedicated news reader. The trade-off is that the app is still organized around one paper's journalism first, with the rest as an extension.

Costs, ads and the free sampling

Citizen Times is free to download, and users can read a limited number of articles each month at no cost. That gives you a way to judge the journalism before deciding whether to pay for more, which is a sensible arrangement for a local title you might only read occasionally.

The app offers in-app purchases, and subscriptions are charged to your Google Play account when you confirm the purchase. The app also carries advertising.

The subscription mechanics are standard for newspaper apps, but they are worth reading carefully before you tap through, because the renewal terms are set by Google Play rather than inside the app. The settings menu also lists subscription help and ways to reach customer service.

How it fits into a news routine

This is not an app for someone who wants a broad, algorithm-driven digest of everything happening in the world. It is built around one community's newspaper, and the value you get from it rises and falls with how much that community's news matters to you. Readers with a connection to the Asheville area will find the most here.

If you follow high school athletics, local government, restaurant openings or the area's weather, the coverage lines up with those interests. The alerts, the saved stories and the offline reading all support that kind of regular, local reading habit rather than casual browsing.

The eNewspaper access to USA TODAY and other local titles broadens the appeal somewhat, and it is the reason someone outside the immediate area might still consider it. Even so, the local paper is the center of the app, and everything else is arranged around it.

A local paper in your pocket, with caveats

Citizen Times is worth installing if you want the Asheville area's reporting on your phone and you like the idea of the print edition in digital form. The combination of local journalism, eNewspaper access across USA TODAY and more than 200 other titles, and the usual reading controls makes a coherent package for a regular local reader.

The caveats are straightforward. The app carries ads, offers in-app purchases, and the free access is limited to a monthly sampling of articles. The average rating from 147 ratings sits at 2.9, which is low enough that I would try the free articles before subscribing. The install base of over 10,000 suggests a modest audience rather than a mass-market one.

My advice is to download it, read the free sampling for a month, and decide from there whether the local coverage is something you will keep returning to. If you already read the paper, this is simply a more convenient way to do it.

What's new in version 8.13.2

• This update includes bug fixes and stability improvements.