On most days, it starts at around 6.30am - unless my children intervene, in which case, it can be considerably earlier. It continues intermittently throughout the day, depending on what I’ve got going on, before peaking during EastEnders and Corrie (not that I’m watching) and again immediately prior to lights-out.
It can drive my nearest and dearest mad, and occasionally – maybe regularly – runs the risk of making me seem profoundly anti-social to those who don’t know me. But I can’t help myself. Thanks to the Guardian iPhone app, I have become a compulsive phone fiddler and bona fide news junkie, restlessly scanning my screen for updates, filling my downtime with scrolling, always looking for another story fix.
I have read the Guardian since I was a student, supplementing regular newspaper purchase with increasingly frequent website visits as the brand’s digital content developed in quality and sophistication. But downloading the app onto my iPhone two years ago, engineered a seismic shift in my habits. It surfaces so much great content with such efficiency that it’s hard to resist the impulse to constantly check in – and, more often than not, stick around and read, read, read.
This ‘snacking’ has reshaped my media consumption to such an extent that I can’t honestly remember how I read the news pre-app. What I do know is that I consume a lot more now, across a much broader range of topics, than I ever have before. I do still buy the paper, but nowadays, only on a Saturday, often finding that I have motored through much of it on my phone the night before.
Compared to accessing the website via a browser, the Guardian app lets you customise your home screen with the content that you read the most, set up news alerts and follow your favourite authors. The functionality in itself is unremarkable, but what’s seductive is the excellence with which the app does simple things and the all-round polish of its delivery. It is quick to load, beautifully designed, easy to read and straightforward to navigate. All of which allows the Guardian to show-off what it does best: journalism.
If it’s content you’re after, the app has already seen you coming. By grouping the Guardian’s output into newspaper-like sections and interspersing them with images, video and regular live coverage of key events, it pulls off the neat trick of exposing a huge number of stories without overloading you – and then proceeds to refresh the list on what feels like a minute-by-minute basis.
This quickly becomes an addictive, immersive experience, especially if you personalise your home screen to deliver the content that most appeals to you. Currently, mine is configured to show everything from the latest UK headlines to football, culture, media and what’s trending. It’s a winning mix of the essential and the serendipitous that unfailingly keeps me coming back for more.
You can also read offline and save stories for later - useful not only on the Underground but also for those in semi-rural areas with infuriatingly patchy mobile coverage (like me). There is always something new to read, which doesn’t sound like a big deal but feels essential when you’re stuck in a Post Office queue with no 3G. In my experience, the app is also impressively stable and rarely wrong-footed by changes in signal, although reviews on iTunes suggest that this is not the case for all.
My only gripe is more prosaic. The famously paywall-averse Guardian has experimented with a number of price points for the app, and the £3.99 I paid originally for a recurring six-monthly sub has always seemed ridiculously cheap. Yet, these days, you can access the vast majority of content on the app for free. A sub (£2.49 a month) allows access to crosswords, archive content, book extracts and an ad-free environment. Even assuming sales on a global scale, it is difficult to see how the revenue generated can underwrite maintenance and development, never mind begin to fund the journalism that it showcases.
Perhaps I fatally misjudge Guardianistas’ collective take on price elasticity, but I would readily pay every month for the convenience and user experience on offer here. While you can argue that the same stories are available free a few clicks away on a browser, it is tiresomely fiddly compared to the app experience and opens up a wider debate about the future of quality journalism when it’s reliant on funding from ads.
As a publisher, I am scratching my head to understand how operating in this way can be sustainable in the long-term, and fundamentally do not believe that it needs to be. News this good is unquestionably worth paying for and the Guardian should not be shy about charging for it.
The Guardian can be downloaded from the App Store.
