NPR 4+

Hot mess but slowly improving

This app is unfortunately a hot mess. I’m a two decade NPR listener. I appreciate going through the daily news stories and building a playlist to listen to throughout the day. Unbelievably they merged the old NPR app which did this fairly well with the NPR One app which is a complete mess of shows, podcasts and ads, without key features like being able to manually sort the playlist. Thankfully that feature has now returned and slow improvements are being made (however if you listen to NPR podcasts I would highly recommend you do it in a dedicated podcast app rather than here).

Suggestions for future updates: 1) a Playlist button in the interface, not hidden 3-4 clicks away. There’s plenty of space at the bottom for one extra button and it’s very annoying to have to click multiple times just to get to it 2) the ability to turn off the annoying ticker at the bottom which shows what you watched previously. Just an X at the end would suffice. It is very annoying. 3) The ability to pin the shows that I like at the top of the Podcasts page instead of having them constantly change because you think you know what I want at different times of the day (which you don’t!) 4)Why do I get audio ads in my playlist? I’m a member of NPR/ PBS

Already miss the Old App

I should have known better than to go with the new NPR app that replaced NPR News. There was so much to love about it. Although I do Support my local NPR Station, I also like to browse, including locally produced programs from other parts of the country, which are not carried by my local station. That was easy to do in the old app. I simply brought up the station, and chose an on-demand program. These shows were displayed alongside the live streams. In addition , I could create a Favorites list, and even add items to a playlist for later use. In the new version, all of these features are gone. Now, the only way to get on-demand material from other stations seems to involve changing one’s favorite station; and, even if you do that, you then have to go to a separate On-Demand tab to get such material, and there are fewer choices of podcasts and topics. For instance, on the old app, I could go to WUNC (not my local station), and listen to podcasts from The People’s Pharmacy. Now, even by making that station my favorite, I found very few choices—and The People’s Pharmacy wasn’t one of them. Then, I had to reset my favorite station; then, to get back to where I was (if it wasn’t my local station), I had to go to Recently Streamed, and _hope to find it there. I hope I will grow to like the new app better, but don’t count on it. The reason I even gave it 4 stars is that I’m a huge fan of NPR.

best place for feed back and feature requests?

please don’t limit playlist to just 100 items or please create another list of liked/saved stories that the user can search and sort. if we think of these individual news stories and podcasts as media there are plenty of media streaming apps to imitate and learn the best features that keep their users happy. if a user wants to prioritize certain shows/segments and skip/hide others they should be able to do that. npr can’t cultivate an experience that will please all unless you allow us to input our preferences

thanks for fixing the first story never playing bug. where is the best place to request features and report feedback/bugs? \n it would be great to be able to customize the UI and prioritize what podcasts show up as the default. maybe favoriting/starring certain podcasts would put them at the top of the daily news show list of podcasts or give them priority. the default ones that are shown there are one i don’t normally listen to. i am trying to reduce the number of actions to get to content. before with the old design it was much faster. \n also can you confirm that everything in the morning news brief of morning edition is a summary of content available in the remaining items in the podcast or is there ever content in the morning news brief that won’t be also aired later on in the programming? thank you

Developer Response ,

Thanks for writing in - we unfortunately experienced an issue with upstream processing for the last few days that is causing some program segments to be unavailable. Teams are working on it and it may still sporadically occur. During this time you may need to tap Next/Forward to skip the first segment of some of our news programs. Rest assured we're working on a longer term fix - please hang in there with us!