The Times advises how to get its iPad app to work: simply hobble your iPad
I don’t read The Times and it’s been a long time since I messed around with its iOS app, but I heard earlier today that a new version recently appeared and immediately got slammed by just about everyone who used it. And, oh my, the ‘10 tips to help improve performance‘ on the iPad 1 are simply stunning, including the following:
- Turning off “as many options as possible” in iCloud.
- Keeping Location Services “to a minimum”.
- Disabling notifications “for apps that are not essential”.
- Disabling iMessage entirely.
- Turning off multitasking gestures.
- Disabling Spotlight indexing.
- Nuking all existing browser history and website data.
The page cheerfully adds:
If you are experiencing problems, or require further assistance, our customer services team are available to help.
I shudder to think what their next tip would be. Presumably:
- Factory reset your iPad and only install The Times. The Times is all you need. THE TIMES IS YOUR LORD AND MASTER NOW.
Note that I do realise that app development is tough, and supporting older devices isn’t easy, but then the App Store reviews I’ve been reading suggest these problems aren’t in fact isolated to the iPad 1, which suggests a much bigger problem. More importantly, the big reason to use a digital newspaper is convenience, but if you have to hobble your device in order to get it to work, you may as well just revert to paper.
I’m surprised they even attempted to make it run on the iPad 1.
I imagine many of its readers were early adopters and some of them will still be using the original model. If not, that’s a pretty big analytics fail. Still, with the app reportedly not working well on the iPad 2, 3 or 4, that’s a bigger problem!
A cached version of a now removed post about the app (mirrored here: http://news3.co.uk/2013/02/20/the-times-are-changing-againsunday-times-and-the-times-now-together-on-ipad-and-in-newsstand/ and cached version here: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:27gFBq8ebN0J:timesdigitalexperiments.tumblr.com/post/43103299702/the-times-are-changing-again-sunday-times-and-the+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk&client=safari) says the iPad 1 is around 20% of readers, but I tested it on the iPad 2, iPad Mini, iPad 3 and iPad 4 and experienced issues with all those devices.