St. Louis Post-Dispatch News

Review by eFreeware

Most news apps try to cover the world. This one covers a city. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch app is the Android face of a Missouri paper that has served the St. Louis area since 1878, and it is built around the stories, teams, weather and politics that matter to people living there. That focus is the whole point: you open it for the Blues, the Cardinals, community reporting and local commentary, not for a generic wire feed.

It is free to download, carries ads, and offers in-app purchases, with the developer pitching a subscription as the way to get unlimited digital access. The app has been around in some form since December 2010 and shows over 100,000 installs with a 4.4 average across 1,436 ratings. If you follow St. Louis news closely, or you have moved away and want to keep up, this is the app the paper itself publishes.

Following the news you actually care about

The feature I would reach for first is the personalization. You pick the local topics that matter to you, and the app assembles what it calls Your Stories around those choices. It seems a small thing at first glance, but it changes the feel of a regional news app: instead of scrolling past everything, you get a feed weighted toward your own interests, whether that is city politics, high school sports or restaurant openings.

Alerts work the same way. You choose which categories you want pushed to you, with news, sports and weather among the options, so the app can stay quiet about the sections you do not follow. Breaking news gets its own treatment through banners at the top of the screen, which tell you what is happening right now without you having to dig for it. Between the two, you can decide how much the app is allowed to interrupt your day.

Reading itself is flexible. Stories can be browsed in the standard news feed or opened in the E-edition, which reproduces the paper's pages rather than a stream of articles. Swiping up and down moves through stories, and left and right moves within them, and you can adjust the text size in your profile settings if the default is too small or too large. Anything you want to come back to can be bookmarked and saved for later.

Sports, weather and the audio option

Sports coverage is one of the pillars here, and the developer is explicit that reporting on the Blues and the Cardinals sits alongside the community news. Beyond the daily stories, the paper runs a sports newsletter called Ben Fred's Five that goes deeper into the St. Louis headlines. If you follow either team, the app is one of the more direct ways to keep up with what the paper's writers are saying about them.

Weather gets more attention than I would expect from a newspaper app. You get hourly conditions and a 10-day forecast, plus frequent video updates, which suits anyone in the region who watches storm systems move in. There is also a listen option: press play and the app reads an article aloud, which is useful when you want the day's reporting while your hands are busy.

Video sits alongside all of this. The app includes video updates and photography, and it remembers where you stopped, so a clip paused on one device can be picked up on another. Podcasts are part of the mix too, and the developer describes them as binge-worthy. Between articles, audio versions, video and podcasts, there is more than one way to take in the same reporting.

Opinion, obituaries and the wider paper

The app is not only breaking news. The app carries opinion, commentary, obituaries and entertainment among its sections, along with politics and business coverage. That breadth is what makes a regional paper app worth keeping installed: you can check a box score, read a column, look up a service notice and find out what is happening at the weekend, all in the same place.

The paper also pushes its newsletters hard, and they are worth knowing about if you prefer email to notifications. Options include Breaking News, the Afternoon Update for a roundup of the day's local stories, Ben Fred's Five for sports, The First Course for food coverage and Political Fix for politics at both the national and local level.

The wider organization matters here too. The Post-Dispatch is part of Lee Enterprises, and the app is published by the paper itself rather than by a third party aggregating its content. That is usually a good sign for how quickly stories appear and how closely the app tracks what the newsroom is producing.

What you need before you start

Setup is deliberately light. You download the app, and you can personalize your experience by choosing the local topics you care about, which is the one step that shapes everything else.

The subscription is the part to think about. The app is free, carries advertising and offers in-app purchases, and the developer's pitch is that subscribers get unlimited access to breaking news, analysis and more. Google Pay is accepted for that. I would treat the subscription as the question to answer for yourself: if the paper's St. Louis coverage is something you read most days, paying for access is a straightforward proposition; if you only drop in occasionally, the free, ad-supported version is where you start.

One practical note: the app was last updated in September 2026, so it is actively maintained rather than left to sit. If something goes wrong, the paper asks that technical issues go to its support address rather than into a store review, which is a fair request and usually gets a faster answer.

Who this app suits

The clearest fit is anyone with a real stake in St. Louis: people who live in the metro area, work there, have family there, or grew up there and moved away. For that reader, the app is a direct line to the reporting that shapes local conversation, from City Hall to the ballpark, and the personalization and alerts make it easy to keep that line narrow.

It also suits readers who want their news in a form other than text. The listen button, the video updates and the podcasts mean you can take in the same coverage while driving, cooking or walking, and the adjustable text size and E-edition give you two more ways to read depending on the day.

What it is not is a general-purpose news app. It is built around one paper and one region, and its value scales with how much you care about that region. Someone who wants broad national and international coverage from a single app will find the scope here much narrower than that, and the subscription only makes sense if the local reporting is what you are after.

A local paper worth carrying in your pocket

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch app does one job and does it in a considered way. The topic-based feed, the alert categories, the breaking news banners, the audio playback, the E-edition and the weather coverage all serve readers who follow a specific city rather than the world at large.

My recommendation is simple. If St. Louis is your city, or the place you still think of as home, install it and spend a few minutes choosing your topics and alerts; that setup is what turns a generic feed into something you will actually open. If the paper's local reporting is central to how you follow the news, the subscription is the version to consider. If you are looking for a broad national newsreader, this one is built for a much smaller map, and that is exactly the point.