Reno Gazette Journal

Review by eFreeware

The Reno Gazette Journal app is the Android edition of the Reno newspaper, published by USA TODAY Co. and listed under News & Magazines. It carries the paper's local reporting alongside national coverage, photography and video, and it is free to download.

The main reason to consider it is convenience: one app for Reno news, high school and pro sports, things to do around town, weather alerts and a digital version of the printed paper. For anyone with ties to the area, that bundle is the appeal.

What you get day to day

At its core the app is a reading experience. The developer describes a streamlined, fast-loading layout built for viewing stories, photos and videos without much friction, which is the sensible approach for a news product you might open several times a day. The emphasis on photography and video suggests the visual side of the paper's reporting gets real space here rather than being an afterthought.

Coverage is broad in the way a local daily's is. You get in-depth journalism, things to do around town, and sports from high school up to the professional level, plus national stories that come with the wider USA TODAY network. That mix means the app can serve both someone who follows local government and someone who mainly wants Friday night football scores.

Notifications are part of the package too. Alerts cover breaking news, scores and weather, and you can set them to match what you follow. For a local paper, weather and breaking news are the two areas where a push alert is genuinely useful.

Reading it your way

The app includes a handful of settings that matter for regular reading. You can save stories to a favorites list, change the text size, switch on night mode, and read offline. The offline option is the one I'd value most on a news app, since it lets you load up reading material before you lose signal.

Saved stories and adjustable text are small features individually, but together they let you shape the app around how you read rather than the other way around. Night mode is a reasonable inclusion for anyone who catches up on news in the evening.

None of this is unusual for a modern news app, and the developer presents it as standard convenience rather than a headline feature. That seems right. The value is in having these options present and easy to reach, not in them being novel.

The eNewspaper and the wider network

The eNewspaper is the piece that distinguishes this from a plain news feed. It reproduces the print edition in a format you can read on a phone or tablet. For readers who grew up with the physical paper, that familiarity is worth something.

Access extends beyond Reno as well. The same feature opens USA TODAY and more than 200 other local eNewspapers, which turns the app into a broader reading tool for anyone who follows news in several cities. If you have family elsewhere or travel often, that reach is a genuine bonus.

The combination of a live feed and a page-faithful edition covers two different reading habits: skimming what's new, and sitting down with a complete issue. Few local apps try to do both, so this is the strongest argument for installing it.

Costs, ads and what to expect

The app is free to download and carries advertising, and there are in-app purchases. All users can read a sampling of free articles each month; beyond that, full access runs through a subscription. Per the developer's terms, Google Play bills you when you confirm a subscription, and it renews each month or year unless you cancel at least a day before the period ends.

That renewal detail is the practical thing to note. If you subscribe and later decide you're done, the cancelation window closes a day before the period ends, so it's worth setting a reminder rather than relying on memory. Subscription support and customer service contacts are available in the app's settings.

The app holds a 2.9 rating from 158 ratings, which is low for a news app. The most recent update, in September 2026, lists bug fixes and stability improvements.

The app dates back to May 2012 and is rated Everyone 10+.

Who this fits

This app is built for people with a real stake in the Reno area: residents who want local reporting, sports and weather in one place, and former residents or frequent visitors who want to keep up from a distance. The eNewspaper replica and the access to other local papers widen that circle to anyone who prefers reading a complete edition over scrolling a feed.

The free sampling makes it easy to judge whether the coverage matches your interests before committing to a subscription, and the offline and text-size options suit readers who want to control how they read.

It is a focused local news app rather than a general-purpose aggregator, and the subscription, ads and monthly free-article limit are part of how it works. Readers who want a broad, ad-supported news feed should weigh that before installing.

A worthwhile install for Reno readers

The Reno Gazette Journal app does one job well: it puts local reporting, sports, weather alerts and the print edition in a single place on Android. The eNewspaper and the wider network of local papers are the features that stand out, and the reading options make it comfortable for daily use.

The trade-offs are the ads, the in-app purchases and the monthly limit on free articles, plus a store rating that suggests plenty of users have been unhappy. Those are real, but they're the terms of a local news subscription rather than flaws in the app's design.

If you follow Reno news and want it in one app, this is a sensible install, and the free sampling gives you a low-risk way to try it. If you're looking for news from many sources, the subscription model here will not match what you want.

What's new in version 8.13.2

• This update includes bug fixes and stability improvements.