National Geographic Reviews – Page 7
5/5 rating based on 243 reviews. Read all reviews for National Geographic for iPhone.
National Geographic is free iOS app published by Disney Electronic Content, Inc.
NOT the magazine
Vypper
Finally got around to catching up on my last 7 months of nat geo, opened the app, and surprise! Had to come here to look at reviews to see what happened. If it was just a matter of no offline access and no downloads it could be forgiven, but the articles / contents of the app are not ALL the ones that are in the magazine, maybe around 60%. Why? Makes no sense. Luckily, by logging into the nat geo website I can get the archived issues, which DO have all the original content. But then I’m awkwardly scrolling through a website not optimized for tablets. So why have an app at all? Just call it “nat geo light” or “nat geo highlights” or something. Used to be the best magazine app too, which is a shame.
Get this issue fixed or else
aquatwin
After 6 months, still unable to view digital issues offline. I will cancel my subscription if this isn’t resolved satisfactorily soon. Publishers evidently think it is acceptable to scam their readers.
Terrible version
Habsburgo
A very-very poor version of a magazine you would expect way more of. It's nothing more than the printed version in electronic format - I could do it at home, like it were a PDF. Not at all adequate to a tablet screen, lettering is frequently tiny, some pages are virtually impossible to read without a magnifying lens (take some double page maps and charts, for instance). Bad job NGM, I can't figure out what crossed your minds. Please rethink the whole thing. I'm seriously considering not to renew my subscription.
Removed ALL my purchased magazines
Haxxsaw
I have subscribed to NG for years through iTunes. I find that I no longer have access to my current subscription, or any of the previous issues that I have already paid for. There is NO option to restore purchases. Apple will never get a dime out of me again for any subscription. And neither will NG.
Worst app in apple store
Croata-man
I’m really surprised that makers of this garbage app and whoever told developers to make it this way are not arrested and banned for life of having access to any digital media. Perfectly functional app that allowed downloading contest and read it as real magazine is gone. Who even wants to pay for this junk? Not me and a lot of people I talked too. NG needs to get their act together and in 21 century put back app that had ability to download printed version of the magazine. Everything else is an insult to human race. It’s not even their greed in this case, just stupidity at its finest.
Decent I suppose
jbram63
I never had the previous nat geo app, so I can’t compare that like others have. But this does seem like a website more than a magazine extension. There’s a lot of great content to read and watch, but what’s quite bothersome is that every headline seems like it’s clickbait “First time a hippo is caught on camera doing ...” or “wolves caught on camera for the first time ever eating ...” and even “Most widespread wildlife crime raid ever sweeps across ...” Every headline is like this and there’s no good reason for it. First, your PAYING customers are already here; no need to force us to click every article just to read the headline. Second, there’s more than enough “white space” around the headline that is cutoff. And if there truly isn’t enough space because of Nat Geo’s “artistic layout,” then shorten the headline. Really, there’s no need for the ellipses and clickbait—this isn’t Facebook. Another issue the magazine portion itself. Just seems lazily done. I remember when apple first introduced magazines in the newsstand app. It was such a fun experience to have the physical magazine look in a digital experience and with clickable links to look up places, see related articles, expand photos, and just a more interactive experience. The digital versions of magazines truly were an extension of the print version. With this app, it just seems like they went the way of a basic website. Click a story, read story, see a couple photos about the story, go back to the “magazine” content page and repeat. There’s no real interaction or experience. It just is. Worth a subscription? I guess. I got mine for $10 by listening to the new Nat Geo podcast Overheard. For the normal $55 price? Absolutely not. Not for the digital subscription at least. Hope they listen to their customers. It’s really unfortunate that they’ve lost long time customers just because they’re being stubborn about maintaining a different direction for the app. Stick with what works and what people like. All the best
Not the magazine anymore
Anhdru
If you, like me, have a digital subscription to National Geographic, be warned: you cannot read the magazine articles through this app and you can no longer download issues of the magazine to read offline. The developers have taken a great magazine and created a miserable digital "experience" version, with truncated articles and no real organization. I am hoping the developers are reading these reviews and will restore the magazine version to this app. Those like me who live abroad (Australia) do not have a realistic option to get the print version.
Useless
JimG7271
Why would you ‘upgrade’ the app so that customers can’t download the digital magazine anymore for offline viewing.
Disappointing
carribas
This app in its current version is a tremendous disappointment to this 4 decades-long National Geographic reader. While NG was a pioneer in magazine apps and previous versions were an attractive extension of the print magazine, with vivid article layouts and rich supplementary content, including videos, the current version is flat by comparison and has none of those extras. The article presentation previously mirrored the graphic design in the print version, but now we get just a boring, webpage-like presentation on a plain white background. Navigation is confusing, with much of the content, aside from the feature articles, inexplicably hidden and accessible only if you click on a very inconspicuous link within each article. You will then find yourself prompted to login, but even after you do, the app will continue asking you to login again anyway. Extremely annoying! Finally, the one very nice addition to the app is the inclusion of some archived issues going all the way back to the magazine’s founding in 1888. But one wonders why, months after this feature was introduced, NG’s team have still not made the rest of the full archive available in the app. This is, after all, content that is already digitized and readily available to subscribers on a website. But the reading experience is much better within the app, which takes advantage of the iPad’s full screen and is much faster. So I really hope the entire archive will be available in the app soon. In sum, NG definitely has the digital expertise and the big budget to do much better. In fact, they already have in the past. So here’s hoping they do.