The Daily Disappointment

The Daily, News Corporation’s newpaper exclusively for the iPad has already  received a maintenance update taking it to version 1.0.1. This update is suppose to bring much needed  performance improvements, better stability, an improved introduction experience, updated Twitter login and posting, a change in image text concatenation, and a giant caveat.

If you are already a reader of The Daily and updated your existing version to 1.0.1, you may have experienced the same crashes and start up problems.  I did.  But there is apparently a solution.

YOU MUST DELETE The Daily app that is already on your ipad. Then install The Daily app again.  So many have experienced crashes after updating that  the App Store is now displaying a warning to follow the above procedure.

The app looks good, if you can actually get it to work. The stability and load times have been terrible.  The Daily is difficult to launch.  Most iPad applications appear immediately with no lag time.

The Daily Cover Flow interface is laggy.  When minimized, The Daily continues to scroll through pages automatically.  When you resume the app,  you will find yourself at a completely different page of the publication, than where you left.

I read the Wall Street Journal on the iPad and have not experienced any problems. In fact, I get the actual newspaper delivered to my house, but I haven’t read it in months.  It’s a great read on the iPad. 

I think The Daily could be a nice complement to the Wall Street Journal.  The Wall Street Journal is world class daily newspaper.  The Daily does is not being published to compete with the WSJ. I would describe The Daily as a People/ ESPN the Magazine/USA Today daily extravaganza of interesting and interactive sights, sounds and news stories.

The Daily has been a huge disappointment.  I deleted the initial app tonight and reloaded the new version.  We’ll see how that goes over the next few days.

I want this app to succeed.  It’s a great idea but the execution has been horrible.  I will not pay for a subscription until the technical issues are solved.    Hopefully, the problems with the app will be fixed with the update.  I have enjoyed the content, when I could read it, which has not been very often.

Content is not a problem for me. The writing has met my expectations.  Now that I have the software update, I’m going to give The Daily another chance.  I suggest that News Corp give all subscribers a new two week free subscription period, starting with the download of the software update.  The initial version was not ready for prime time.  Frankly it was an embarrassing failure and certainly not something I expected to come from the marriage of News Corp and Apple.