Deseret News

Review by eFreeware

Most news apps try to be everything to everyone. The Deseret News app does the opposite: it is the Android home of one masthead, a paper that has been publishing since 1850, and it covers the ground that paper covers — local and national news, sports, opinion, business, and sections for family and faith. That last pairing is the distinctive part, and it tells you quickly who this is for.

If you already read the Deseret News, or you want a news app where family and faith coverage sits alongside the box scores and business headlines rather than buried somewhere, this is built for you. It is free, it carries ads, and it has no in-app purchases. The app has been on Google Play since the end of October 2012 and has passed 100,000 installs, with a 4.4 average across more than 5,400 ratings. Readers of other outlets will find the same mechanics here, but not the same editorial voice.

What reading it is like

The app organizes the paper's output into sections, and each section has its own front: local, national, sports, opinion, business, family and faith. Within a section you can reorder what you see by featured stories, the latest stories, or the most popular ones, which is a small thing that changes how the app feels. Featured gives you the editors' picks, latest gives you a chronological feed, and most popular shows what other readers have been drawn to.

There are two ways to browse. Grid view puts stories in a visual arrangement that leans on the photography; list view is denser and faster to scan when you are hunting for a specific headline. Both are described as easy to navigate, and the choice between them is really a choice about how much you care about images versus how many headlines you want on screen at once.

Once you open a story, the developer describes a swipe-through reading experience, so you move between articles with a gesture rather than backing out to a menu each time. That suits the way most people actually read a paper on a phone — one story leading into the next — and it is the part of the design I would expect to matter most day to day.

Photos, video and sharing

Stories come with high-resolution photos and streaming video, according to the developer. For a paper with a strong visual side, particularly in sports and local coverage, that matters: a photo that holds up when you tap to enlarge is a different experience from a thumbnail that pixelates.

Sharing is handled through email, Twitter and Facebook, which covers the everyday case of sending a story to a friend or posting it to a feed.

Reading without a connection

Offline reading is the feature I would single out for anyone whose day includes dead zones — a commute with patchy coverage, a flight, a stretch of rural highway, or a building where the signal simply does not reach. The developer says stories can be read without a connection.

This is the kind of feature that quietly changes how you use a news app. Instead of opening it only when you have bars, you can treat it as something to fill a wait. I would treat offline reading as a convenience for the current news cycle rather than an archive you build up over months.

What it asks of you

The app is free to install and supported by ads, and there are no in-app purchases to consider. That is the whole of the cost picture: you pay with attention rather than money. The content is rated for Everyone.

The trade-offs are mostly about scope. This is one newspaper's app, not a neutral aggregator, so the value you get depends entirely on whether you want that paper's reporting. The family and faith sections are a real part of the mix here rather than an afterthought, and if those subjects are not what you read about, the app will feel narrower than a general news reader.

The most recent update listed is bug fixes. That is worth knowing if you are the sort of reader who wants an app to keep evolving; it is also a sign that the core experience is considered settled.

Who this reader fits

The clearest fit is someone who already knows the Deseret News and wants it on a phone without a browser in the way. The section structure, the sort options and the swipe-through reading all assume you are there for this paper's coverage and want to move through a lot of it.

A second fit is the reader who wants news, sports, business and opinion in one place alongside family and faith coverage, and who would rather have one publication's editorial judgment than a feed assembled from everywhere. The offline reading makes it more useful than a simple headline list for anyone who reads in transit or in places with unreliable signal.

It also works for the casual reader who checks in once or twice a day rather than following a live feed. The most-popular sort is a reasonable way to catch up quickly, and the grid view gives a visual overview of what is worth opening. Where it will feel thin is for anyone who wants many sources in a single app, or who expects a news reader to be a neutral pipe rather than a publication.

The case for installing it

The Deseret News app is a well-worn, straightforward reader for one newspaper, and it does the things a reader needs: sections you can navigate, stories you can sort by featured, latest or most popular, photos and video, sharing to email, Twitter and Facebook, and offline reading for when the signal drops.

I would install it if the Deseret News is already part of your reading, or if a news app with family and faith sections alongside the usual beats sounds like your kind of mix. The offline reading alone makes it worth a place on a phone that travels. If you want a single app that pulls from many outlets, this is one paper's app and it is content to be exactly that.

What's new in version 5.11.0

Bug fixes.