It’s not just new apps that we like to review in our App of the Week, sometimes a complete overhaul of an existing app is just as important and interesting. This week we’re looking at the new Guardian app, it’s been on my phone pretty much since I bought it and is usually my first point of call when it comes to looking up the news. So when I got the notification last week then to say that they were going to be relaunching the app, I was pretty excited to see what was going to change.
The first thing you’ll notice is the new icon, it’s much cleaner than the old one, finally adopting the iOS 7 design standard. This icon design change pretty much sets the scene for the rest of the application. The UI has been completely overhauled with a crisp white tiles of news sitting atop a slightly off white background. These tiles vary in shape and size to prioritise bigger stories and fit the less important ones around them. You can either browse all stories by scrolling down the page or swipe your thumb to the right from the edge of the screen to bring out a sidebar and pick individual categories.
If you login with your Facebook, Twitter or Guardian Account, you can customise your homepage to only see the stories you’re interested in from the start. Logging in also allows you to save stories for later in a bookmark tab and share stories through your own social networks. After only trying it quickly, the app seems to work fairly well offline too, as long as you’ve opened the app with a connection it will cache stories locally for you to read while you’re on the train, tube or anywhere else that never seems to have a great connection.
It’s a really great app, with an excellent redesign. As you would expect it’s free to download and use, although with a paid subscription you get access to the crossword, premium content (archived stories), extracts and previews from books, no adverts and the promise of being the first to trial new features. A subscription will cost £2.49 for a month or £11.99 for six months and these can be purchased within the application.
Tradebox Media are an award-winning software development agency based in Cardiff, UK.