Florida Today: Local News

Review by eFreeware

Local news is easy to lose track of. A paper lands on the driveway for a while, then you move, or the delivery gets spotty, and suddenly you are getting your information about your own town from a feed built for someone three states away. The Florida Today app is an attempt to close that gap on Android, and it comes from USA TODAY Co., the publisher behind the paper of the same name.

The pitch is straightforward: local reporting, photography and video for Brevard County readers, with national coverage folded in through the same company's wider network. The app has been on Google Play since April 2012 and sits at a 2.3 average across 310 ratings, with more than 50,000 installs. It is free to download, carries ads, and offers in-app purchases.

That rating is low enough that I would not ignore it, but it also does not tell you much on its own. What I can do is walk through what the developer says the app contains, what it asks of you, and which readers are likely to get value from it.

The local reporting at the center of it

The core of the app is access to the paper's own journalism. That means things to do around town, sports coverage running from high school games up to the professional leagues, and the general run of local news that a community paper handles. If you follow a local team or want to know what is happening on a given weekend, this is the section of the app that matters most.

The developer describes the reading experience as streamlined and quick to load, which is the right ambition for a news app but also the kind of claim I take with a grain of salt until it is in front of me. What is more concrete is the mix: written stories, photo galleries, and video, all presented together rather than split across separate apps or sites.

This is a narrow proposition in a useful way. The app is built around one county's news, not around general interest reading, so its value depends almost entirely on whether you care about that area. Readers with a connection to Brevard County, whether they live there now or moved away and still follow it, are the ones this is built for.

Alerts, saved stories and reading controls

Around the reporting sits a set of features that make the app usable day to day. Breaking news alerts, sports scores and weather notifications arrive in real time, and the developer says they can be tailored to your interests, so you are not necessarily getting everything the newsroom publishes pushed to your lock screen.

The reading controls are the part I would use most. You can save stories for later, change the text size, switch on night mode, and read offline. Those last two matter for anyone who reads on a phone in low light or wants to load up a few articles before losing signal.

There is also the eNewspaper, which reproduces the print edition in a form you can open on a phone or tablet. The same feature reaches USA TODAY and more than 200 other local eNewspapers from the same publisher, which widens the app considerably beyond one county's coverage. For readers who grew up with the print paper and miss its layout, that is likely to be the feature that decides whether the app stays installed.

What the app asks of you

The download is free and every user gets a sampling of free articles each month. Beyond that sampling, reading is tied to a subscription.

Confirming a purchase charges your Google Play account, and the subscription then renews monthly or yearly on its own. To stop renewing, switch it off in your Play account more than a day before the period ends. The app's settings include a subscription support section with more detail and customer service contacts if something goes wrong.

Two other things are worth knowing before you install. The app carries advertising, and it offers in-app purchases alongside the subscription. The content rating is Everyone 10+, so it is not aimed at younger children. None of that is unusual for a news app.

Getting the most out of a daily read

The sensible approach is to treat notifications as something to configure rather than accept. If you mainly want local sports results and severe weather, narrowing the alerts to those keeps the app from becoming noise. If you follow breaking news closely, the opposite setting makes more sense. Either way, the tailoring is there to be used.

Saved stories and offline reading work well as a pair. Rather than opening the app whenever you have a spare moment, you can save what looks interesting during the day and read it later. Night mode and text size adjustments are worth setting once and leaving alone.

The eNewspaper is best thought of as a separate habit rather than a replacement for the article feed. It suits a slower read, particularly on a tablet, and the access to other local titles from the same publisher is a genuine bonus if you keep an eye on more than one part of the state. The latest release only addressed bugs and stability.

A local paper in app form, for local readers

The Florida Today app does one job: put Brevard County's news, sports and photography on your phone, with alerts, reading controls and a print-style edition alongside it. It does that job within the limits of a subscription model and an ad-supported free tier, and it does not pretend to be a general news reader.

My recommendation is for readers with a real stake in that coverage. If you follow local high school or professional sports, want weather and breaking news alerts for the area, or miss the print edition and would rather have it on a tablet, the app covers all of that in one place. The subscription is the main thing to weigh.

The 2.3 average across 310 ratings is a caution rather than a verdict, and it is the kind of score I would want to see alongside my own reading before deciding. If local coverage is what you are after, install it, read through the free articles, and let the reporting itself tell you whether the subscription is worth it.

What's new in version 8.13.2

• This update includes bug fixes and stability improvements.