Sun Sentinel

Review by eFreeware

Local news is easy to lose track of. National outlets cover the big stories, but the school board vote, the restaurant that just opened, the high school team's playoff run and the road project near your exit rarely make it into those feeds.

The Sun Sentinel app from Tribune Publishing Inc. is built for exactly that. It is a free Android app in the News & Magazines category, and the developer describes it as a simple, elegant and customizable way to get the paper's premium storytelling. The install numbers are modest compared with mass-market news apps — over 50,000 — and the average rating sits at 2.8 from 546 ratings, so it is worth going in with a clear idea of what the app does well.

A feed you arrange around your own interests

The core of the app is a personalized news feed. You select the topics that matter to you, and the app assembles coverage around those choices. Politics, sports, business and entertainment are all in the mix, and the developer's One-Tap Following feature is meant to make adding a topic quick rather than a chore. What appeals to me here is the restraint: rather than asking you to configure a dozen settings before you see anything, it sounds like a feed you can shape as you go.

The section list is editable, so you can put the parts of the paper you actually read at the top and let the rest sit lower down. That matters more than it sounds. A news app that opens on a section you never touch trains you to ignore it. Being able to reorder things means the app can match the way you already read — sports first, say, or business before entertainment.

Turning the device sideways gives you another way to view the news. The developer frames this as an entirely different view rather than a simple rotation, which suggests it is a deliberate reading mode rather than an accident of orientation. I would expect that to be the sort of feature you either use constantly or forget about, but it is a genuine option rather than a gimmick.

Staying current without living in the app

Breaking news arrives through notifications from the newsroom, which is the practical way to keep up with a story that develops during the day. The trade-off is familiar to anyone who has used a news app: alerts are only useful if they are worth interrupting you for, and the developer controls that cadence. If you want to follow a hurricane, an election or a trial as it unfolds, this is the mechanism that makes the app useful between reading sessions.

For everything else, there is a save function. You can keep stories, photos and videos for when you have time to sit with them, which suits the way many people read a newspaper — a quick scan during the day, a longer session in the evening. The Progress Report complements this by tracking what you have read and what you have not, so a half-finished article does not disappear into the scroll.

The app also carries videos and photo galleries, which the developer presents as exclusive to the paper. Photojournalism is one of the areas where a local newsroom can still offer something a wire feed cannot, particularly for weather, sports and community events. Sharing is handled through Twitter, Facebook or email, so passing a story along to someone who cares about the same local issue takes a couple of taps.

What you need before you start

The app is free to download, and it carries ads. It also offers in-app purchases. If a paid element matters to your decision, treat it as something to check inside the app rather than something you can plan around in advance.

Setup involves choosing topics and arranging your section list. No account, subscription or credentials are needed. A new author view on articles and a fix for an intermittent content loading message suggest the app is being maintained rather than left to sit.

The readers this fits

This app is for people with a real stake in Florida news. If you live in the region the paper covers, or you have family, property or business interests there, the mix of politics, sports, business, dining and nightlife coverage is aimed at you. The dining and nightlife angle in particular is the sort of thing a general news app would never bother with, and it is a reasonable reason to keep a local app installed.

It also suits readers who want to shape their own feed rather than accept an editor's front page. The combination of topic selection, reorderable sections and a running record of what you have read points to an app designed for people who read a paper in a particular order and want that order respected.

The 2.8 average from 546 ratings is worth weighing honestly. That is a lukewarm score, and it is a signal to set expectations accordingly. If you want a single app to be your only news source, the rating suggests you should try it before committing to that role for it. If you want a local supplement to whatever else you read, the bar is lower and the app's feature set looks more than adequate.

A local news app worth trying if Florida is your beat

The Sun Sentinel app does one job and does it in a focused way: it puts a Florida newsroom's output into a feed you can arrange around your own interests, with notifications for breaking stories, a save function for longer reads and a progress tracker so you know where you left off. The editable section list and topic-based feed are the features that would keep me coming back, because they put the reader in charge of the shape of the app rather than the other way around.

The caveats are straightforward. It is free with ads and in-app purchases, the rating average is modest, and the coverage is regional by design. None of those are problems if you are looking for a local paper's app to sit alongside whatever else you read; they matter more if you want one app to cover everything.

My recommendation is to install it if Florida news is something you actively follow and you want a feed you can tune. Readers who want a broad national or international digest, or who are put off by ads and purchases in a news app, have reason to think twice before making it a daily habit.

What's new in version 10.0.62

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