Orlando Sentinel

Review by eFreeware

Keeping up with a city you care about usually means juggling a homepage, a handful of social accounts and whatever a search engine happens to surface that morning. A local paper's own app can cut through that if it is built around the way you actually read. The Orlando Sentinel, from Tribune Publishing Inc., is that paper's Android offering, and it has been in the store since January 2011.

It sits in the News & Magazines category, is free to download and carries a 2.3 average from 594 ratings, with 304 written reviews and more than 50,000 installs. Those numbers tell you this is a modestly sized app rather than a mass-market one, which fits a title tied to a single metropolitan area.

What I want to work out below is what that customization amounts to in practice, what the app asks of you, and whether it earns a place on your phone.

What the app actually delivers

At its core this is a news reader for one city. It carries Orlando coverage across news, politics, sports, business and entertainment, and it follows the local dining and nightlife scene as that changes. If you live in or near Orlando, that is a broad enough sweep to cover most of what a daily paper would give you, delivered to a phone instead of a doorstep.

The material includes video and photo galleries alongside written stories, so some coverage arrives as visual reporting rather than text. You can also pass stories on to other people through Twitter, Facebook or email, which covers the usual ways a link travels.

Breaking news from the newsroom can arrive as notifications. For a local paper that is the feature with the clearest everyday value: when something significant happens in the area, you hear about it without checking the app. It is also the feature most likely to test your patience, since a newsroom's idea of breaking news does not always match yours.

Building a feed around your interests

The customization runs through the whole app. You choose topics that interest you and the app assembles a personalized feed from them, and One-Tap Following is the mechanism for adding those topics quickly rather than hunting through menus. For someone who follows the Magic and local politics but has no interest in business coverage, that should mean a front page that reflects it.

You can also edit the section list into your preferred order. That is a small thing, but it matters over time: putting the sections you read first at the top saves a scroll on every visit. Between topic selection and section ordering, the app gives you two separate levers for shaping what you see.

One more touch is orientation. Turning the device sideways gives you a different visual view of the news, so the same content can be read in a second layout. It is the sort of detail that suggests the app was designed for reading rather than just for pushing headlines.

Saving stories and tracking what you have read

Two features handle the reality that nobody reads everything the moment it publishes. You can save stories, photos and videos to enjoy when you have time, which turns the app into a holding area for longer pieces and galleries rather than a stream you have to keep up with in real time.

Progress Report does the complementary job: it keeps track of what you have read and what you have not. For anyone who opens the app in short bursts, that is the difference between resuming where you left off and scrolling past the same headlines repeatedly.

Together these two are the strongest argument for using the app rather than a browser. A saved queue plus a read marker is a reading system, and it is the part of the design I would expect regular readers to lean on most.

What it asks of you, and what to weigh

The app is free, and it is ad-supported. It also offers in-app purchases.

The focus is narrow by design. This is the Orlando Sentinel, so the coverage is Orlando's: its politics, its teams, its restaurants, its business community. That is the whole point of a paper's app, and it also means the value you get scales directly with how much central Florida matters to you.

The rating is worth acknowledging without over-reading it. I would not treat the score as a verdict on the journalism, since app ratings tend to reflect the reading experience rather than the reporting behind it.

Who this fits

The clearest fit is someone with a standing interest in Orlando: a resident, someone with family or property there, or a reader who moved away and still follows the city. For that person the combination of local breadth, topic-based feeds and breaking news alerts covers the daily need well.

It also suits readers who prefer to assemble their own front page. If you would rather pick the topics you see than accept an editor's ordering, the feed controls and section ordering give you that control without much effort.

The saving and progress features point to a third group: people who read in fragments and want a place to park longer pieces. If you read a paper in one sitting every morning, those tools matter less, and the app becomes a straightforward way to read the Sentinel on a phone.

A local paper in your pocket

The Orlando Sentinel app does one job: it puts one city's news on your phone in a form you can shape. The topic-based feed, reorderable sections, saved items and read tracking are a coherent set of reading tools, and breaking news notifications add the immediacy a local paper is good at.

The trade-offs are equally plain. It is free and ad-supported, it carries in-app purchases, and its coverage stops at Orlando's borders. The 2.3 average from 594 ratings is a caution rather than a disqualifier, and the September 2026 update suggests the developer is still working on the reading experience.

If Orlando is your city, this is a reasonable way to follow it, and the customization is the reason to choose it over reading the site in a browser. If it is not, there is little here for you.

What's new in version 10.0.62

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