Borderline Unusable on Older iPad Air – TED Review

I’ve been an avid watcher of TED for many years, shifting over to the app when it was released and very happy with it for years on my original iPad and later this iPad Air. That lasted until the last time I updated the app, which was some time ago and not recently. Things changed right away, barely working in some ways, but there was a lot of comment about it at the time and I believed that whatever the underlying causes were could be quickly identified and corrected, so I just waited for the update that would fix it. So far.....just crickets. The same app works great on my (much) newer iPhone, and running the site through browsers on the iPad works just fine too. On using the app, however, any or all of the following are routinely encountered: • failure to load at all, or might eventually if you can stand watching the little electron field thingy for 5+ minutes • no access to on screen controls at all or, if they work on the first talk watched, usually go away on the second one • often the only way to quit any talk and move on is to force quit the app and start over • often locked in to the “next recommended” loop and, again, the only way out is force quitting. • other times, first talk ends and the screen goes blank and dead; force quit is the only way out of that as well. And others, but you get the point by now. I have no memory or network speed issues at all and the software is updated to the max level it can be — this app and this machine just don’t play well together. I’d be happy to go back to the older app if that’s the only way to recover the convenience and functionality that I had back in the day, but getting a new iPad, which I’m confident would also do the trick, seems like a third-best idea
Review by Jai Yen on TED.