The Press-Enterprise

Review by eFreeware

If you live in or follow Inland Southern California, The Press-Enterprise app is built with you in mind. It carries news and information for that region and layers on the conveniences a modern news reader expects: a feed tuned to the topics you pick, articles you can set aside for later, and the day's paper in replica form. The app is free to download and comes from MediaNews Group, Inc.

What appeals to me most is that the app does not assume every reader wants the same thing. You can narrow the feed to subjects you care about, follow topics as you read, and choose which ones are allowed to send notifications. For someone who wants local coverage without wading through a general news feed, that combination is the main reason to install it.

It is not a niche experiment. The app has been installed more than 10,000 times and holds a 2.8 average from 508 ratings, with 215 written reviews. That rating is modest for a news app, and I would treat it as a signal to look at what the app offers rather than as a verdict on your own experience.

A local paper for the Inland Empire

The app's focus is the news and information of Inland Southern California, and that is the frame everything else sits inside. If the region is where you live, work or have family, the coverage is directly relevant; if you are looking for national or international reporting as the main course, this is a regional title first.

That regional identity shapes the way the app is organized. Sections are the backbone, and the top navigation bar lets you move between them by swiping or tapping, so you can settle into the areas you read most. It is a straightforward arrangement, and it suits readers who already know which parts of a local paper they want.

I would expect the app to fit readers who want a steady local briefing rather than a broad aggregator. The personalized feed and follow tools exist to keep that briefing from turning into noise, which is the right instinct for a regional paper.

A feed you shape yourself

The Your News tab is where personalization lives. You choose the topics you are genuinely interested in, and the app uses those preferences to recommend content. The point, as the developer frames it, is to bypass the volume of everything published and home in on what you actually want to read.

Following topics works at the article level. When you find something worth tracking, you select follow, and related articles gain relevance and appear more often in your feed. Unfollowing is just as quick, so the feed can shift as your interests do.

Notifications are handled with the same idea. Rather than one blanket stream, you select which topics you want to be notified about, which the developer describes as a less intrusive arrangement. For anyone who has abandoned a news app over constant alerts, that control is the feature to look at first.

Saved articles round out the reading flow. Saved articles stay available for later, and notifications can flag new items tied to them. It is a small loop, but it is the one that keeps a news app useful across a week rather than a single sitting.

The paper edition, offline reading and swiping through

For readers who want the newspaper experience rather than a feed, E-News is available inside the app. Going to Settings and selecting E-News opens the digital replica of the day's paper, so there is no need to open a separate app to browse it page by page.

Offline reading is also handled from Settings, where you enable it and adjust your offline reading preferences. If you want to read on a flight or in a spot with poor signal, the option is there to prepare in advance.

Moving through a section is deliberately frictionless. Instead of returning to the main section to find the next article, you can swipe left and the next article in that section opens immediately. It is a small piece of design, but it changes how long a reading session lasts.

The app also carries a set of games: Sudoku, Solitaire, Jumble, Crossword and Puzzles. They are served inside the app, which makes the whole thing a slightly broader package than a pure news reader. I would not install it for the games, but they are a reasonable reason to open it on a quiet afternoon.

What the update changed

The most recent update, dated September 14, 2026, added a new author view to articles and fixed an inadvertent "unable to load this content" message. Both are housekeeping improvements rather than headline features, but the load error fix is the kind of thing readers notice when it is absent.

Users need to sign in again, and subscribers must restore their account to keep access. Subscriptions sit in Settings, where a Restore Subscriptions button is provided. If you update and find your access has lapsed, that is the first place to look.

Free to download, with ads and purchases

The app costs nothing to download. It contains ads and offers in-app purchases, and it also supports subscriber accounts, which is what the restore step in Settings is for.

I would not read the presence of ads or purchases as a problem in itself. A local news operation has to fund its reporting somehow, and a free download with both ads and paid options is a common arrangement for this category. What matters more is whether the reading experience holds up, and that is something each reader will judge for themselves.

The 2.8 average from 508 ratings sits alongside that mix. It is not a strong score, and with 215 written reviews there is plenty of reader opinion to weigh. I would suggest reading a few of those reviews before committing, particularly any that mention the features you care about most.

How it compares with other ways to read the news

The obvious alternative is the newspaper's website in a mobile browser. That route avoids an install, but it also gives up the topic-based feed, the saved-article reminders and the offline reading setup that the app provides.

A general news aggregator is the other comparison. Those apps cast a wide net, pulling in national and international coverage alongside local stories. This app is the opposite: it is built around one region's news, so its value depends on whether that region is yours.

There is also the replica edition to consider. If you already read the paper in its traditional form, having the day's edition inside the same app you use for the feed saves you from juggling two places to read. Readers who only want headlines will not care about that, but for others it is the deciding feature.

A regional news app for regular local readers

The Press-Enterprise app is worth installing if Inland Southern California is your patch and you want its news in a form you can shape. The topic-based feed, article-level following, notification controls and saved articles are the core of that promise, and the replica edition and offline reading cover the readers who still want the paper as a paper.

The caveats are straightforward. It is a free app with ads and in-app purchases, it is tied to one region, and its store rating is a modest 2.8 from 508 ratings. None of those things make it a bad choice, but together they mean it is best approached as a local news tool rather than a general one.

If you want a single place for the region's reporting, with the day's edition and a few puzzles alongside it, this is the app to try. If your news diet is broader than one area, this may not be the app for you.

What's new in version 10.0.62

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