lohud

Review by eFreeware

If you live in or around the Lower Hudson Valley and you want to keep up with what is happening there, the lohud app is built for exactly that. It is the mobile home of The Journal News, published by USA TODAY Co., and it gathers local reporting, photography and video into one place rather than scattering it across a browser and a social feed. The install count sits at over 50,000, and the average rating is 3.3 from 211 ratings, which is the kind of middling score that usually means people like the content and have opinions about everything around it.

What you get is a steady feed of community journalism: town news, things to do, and sports that runs from high school games up to the professional leagues. The app also pulls in national coverage, so you are not switching between sources to get the wider picture. For someone who checks the local paper the way other people check a weather app, that combination is the main draw.

What reading it is actually like

The developer describes the reading experience as streamlined and fast-loading, with stories, photos and videos presented so you can move through them quickly. That is the right ambition for a news app, because the alternative, a slow page that reloads every time you tap back, is what sends people to a browser instead. The app has been on Google Play since May 2012 and was last updated in late September 2026, so it has had a long run of iterations behind it.

There is a reasonable amount of control over how you read. You can save stories you want to come back to, change the text size, switch to night mode, and read offline, which matters if you want to load up on articles before a flight or a stretch without a signal. None of these are unusual features in a news app, but they are the ones that decide whether you keep it installed.

The content itself is the reason to choose this over a general news aggregator. Local reporting at this level, with a photography desk and video alongside it, is not something you can assemble from national outlets. If the Lower Hudson Valley is your patch, the value is in the coverage rather than the interface.

Alerts, scores and the daily habit

Notifications are the feature that turns a news app from something you open into something that reaches you. The app sends 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 part worth setting up on day one, because a news app with everything switched on becomes noise within a week.

Scores are worth calling out separately. Coverage runs from high school athletics through to the professional leagues, and score alerts for a local team are the sort of thing that is genuinely hard to get from a national sports app, which tends to care about the biggest markets. Weather alerts fall into the same category: useful, local and time-sensitive.

My expectation is that most people will end up with a small set of alerts they actually want and ignore the rest. Treat the notification settings as something to tune rather than accept as shipped, and the app is far more likely to stay useful.

The eNewspaper, and why it matters here

The eNewspaper feature reproduces the print edition on a phone or tablet, which is a different way of reading than the article feed. Some people want the paper as it was laid out, with the front page and the sections in order, and this delivers that. It is the part of the app that will appeal most to long-time subscribers who have not fully moved to reading individual stories online.

Access extends beyond the local title. The app includes USA TODAY and more than 200 other local eNewspapers, so a subscriber can read papers from other regions without a separate arrangement. For anyone who travels within the country or has family elsewhere, that widens what the subscription covers considerably.

I would treat the eNewspaper as the feature that justifies the app for a certain kind of reader and is simply ignored by everyone else. Both are fine. It is there when you want the print experience, and the article feed is there when you do not.

What it costs and what it asks of you

Downloading the app costs nothing, and each month readers get a limited set of articles at no charge. Full access otherwise requires a paid plan, billed by Google Play when you confirm the purchase and renewing each month or year until you cancel it in your Play settings. The app also carries advertising and offers in-app purchases. Anyone weighing this up should read those renewal terms properly, because they are the standard auto-renewing arrangement and the timing rule is strict.

The rating is also worth weighing. I cannot tell you what is driving the score, only that the number is worth noticing before you commit to a paid plan.

The content rating is Everyone 10+, which reflects that this is general news coverage rather than anything aimed at young children.

Who this fits

This is an app for people with a real stake in the Lower Hudson Valley. If you follow local government, school sports, community events or the things happening in your own town, the reporting here is the point, and no national outlet is going to cover it. The photography and video add to that, particularly for events you could not attend.

It also suits readers who want local and national news in one place rather than in two apps. The USA TODAY material and the wider eNewspaper catalog mean you are not choosing between your community paper and the bigger headlines. For someone who already subscribes to The Journal News in print, the eNewspaper access is the most natural reason to install it.

If your interest in the region is occasional, the free monthly sampling is a reasonable way to see whether the coverage matches what you care about. The subscription only makes sense if you are reading regularly, and that is a judgment only you can make once you have seen the mix of stories.

A local paper that earns its space on your home screen

The lohud app does one job and does it in a focused way: it puts The Journal News, its photography and its video in front of you, with alerts for the things that cannot wait and an eNewspaper for when you want the print layout. The offline reading, text size and night mode options round out the reading experience, and the access to USA TODAY and 200-plus other local eNewspapers makes a subscription go further than the local title alone.

The trade-offs are the ones you would expect. There are ads, there is a subscription beyond the free monthly sampling, and the renewal terms require you to act in your Play account settings if you want to stop. The 3.3 rating from 211 ratings suggests plenty of users have found something to be unhappy about, and that is worth factoring in before you pay.

I would suggest this to Lower Hudson Valley readers who want consistent local coverage and are willing to subscribe for it, and to existing Journal News subscribers who want the paper on their phone. If the region is not part of your daily life, the free sampling will tell you more than any review can.

What's new in version 8.13.2

• This update includes bug fixes and stability improvements.