At MobileMonday London earlier this week we launched version 2.0 of The Guardian Anywhere, our free newsreader for the Guardian newspaper for Android phones. It's a big step forward for the product, in three ways:

1. We've addressed the main complaint that our customers had with the product, so content now downloads much faster. A full collection of all articles and photos now takes about 10 minutes, where previously we were seeing download times between 15 minutes and an hour. A refresh of the news can now take less than a minute.

2. You'll find two new significant features: Surprise Me, which (in a nod to the strangely compelling Guardian Roulette web-app) takes you to a random article; and Picks, which learns which articles you enjoy reading and makes suggestions for news you might like. You won't notice either of these features at first - Picks kicks in after you've read enough stories for it to start making useful recommendations, and Surprise Me is in the menu of the Picks tab. I'm particularly excited about Picks, because as far as I can see it's not available anywhere else: you can only get it with our app.

3. We've refreshed the whole user interface, thanks to the keen eye of Trevor "Pixel Hose" May. You should notice a much cleaner, more consistent look and feel across the whole product nowadays.
   

James Hugman, who wrote The Guardian Anywhere, gave a presentation at MoMo summarising the product and what we've learned building it. The full slides for his talk are online here, and there are a few points he made that I'd like to emphasise:

1. We dog-fooded this app at FP more than most other products we've worked on. This has made a difference; we've identified bugs, caught UI annoyances and missing features before the public has had a chance to.

2. The Android marketplace makes it easy for us to launch new versions of the app. The lack of an approval process cuts our time-to-launch from days or weeks down to minutes. This means we can get bug-fixes or features deployed fast, and react quickly to suggestions from our customers. This has changed the way we've worked on the product; we tend to launch small pieces often instead of large releases.

3. Fragmentation exists with Android, but just like iPhone, it's much less of a problem than it has been with J2ME. Guardian Anywhere currently support 4 different versions of the Android operating system and over 12 different devices. We have experienced some pain in doing this: the Hero, which uses Android 1.5, seems to give us a disproportionate number of problems and we've seen a small number of quite odd device-specific bugs elsewhere. For instance, our Nexus seems to have much worse network performance on certain wi-fi channels, and SQLite performance for indexing differs significantly between the Nexus and the Magic. These sorts of issues are quite rare, but they exist.
   

The application is free to download from the Android Marketplace. We'd love to hear what you think of it.

And if you're a publisher and you're looking for a fantastic reader application, do please get in touch. We're actively licensing this product at the moment.

Update: A few factual corrections: it was the Nexus causing problems with wireless channels, not the Magic; we've ported to more than 12 devices (23 according to Google Analytics).

Comments

[Cheng]

Hi Tom. Thank you for developing such a nice app for Android. It's an enjoyable experience to use.
After using it for weeks, here's something that need you/James' attention:

1/ The cache of news keep growing and after two to three days, that rolls up to over 150mb.
2/ I found it necessary to uninstall and reinstall GA in order to receive updates. To me, GA usually stops updating itself after the reaching certain size. So, I have to manually remove the cached content and un-/reinstall GA again.

Other than this, this is the best news feed that I've ever used on pda. Thank you and James to bring such a nice thing to us.

With best regards.
Cheng

[Mike]

I have found this also, I am using a G2 Touch (HTC Hero) and have found that the cached files on the SD card just grows and grows to the point there are just over 9000 files in there then Guardian Anywere refuses to download anymore. The only solution is for me to manually put my sd card in a pc and delete some files in the folder.
I love the App and it is my most used App on my device but this bug is quite annoying!
Thanks for a great App anyway and looking forward to updates in the future

[Tom Hume]

Mike - we released a version 2.0.1 to the Android Marketplace last night, which should have fixed the issue you're describing. Could I ask you to update your version of the Guardian Anywhere and let us know how you get on?

[Paul R]

I`ve been using 2.0.1 since it was released but I`m still finding I have a cache of files dating back to the 10th April resulting in 60mb. Would be nice to have a setting so you can choose the number of days before items are deleted automatically. Apart from that great app, keep up the good work!

[Vince Scott]

I've been using GA for some time now, absolutely great app. In fact I recently got a Samsung Galaxy S, and realised after installing lots of apps, that GA was the first thing installed.

One slight snag though, previously on a HTC desire, news downloads pretty quick around the ten minute mark. On the new Galaxy its taking over an hour. Both the Desire and Galaxy have android 2.1.

[David]

Hello. The app looks very slick, but it would realy benefit from a couple of features:
1. An option to automatically delete article that are more than a calendar day old (unless they are specifically saved for later by the user),
2. An option to limit the number of articles saved in each section to, say, 10 or 15;
3. An section for Leaders/Letters.

[Moira]

I love this app. :)

After recent update, no longer loads articles older than about eight weeks (e.g. under tagged authors) unless the article was already saved.

[Vadim]

I've been using GA on my Samsung Galaxy Tab 7", and like it a lot. However, there is a glitch that makes the experience a bit inconvenient. If I start GA while the tab is connected on wifi, and select "fetch all", it downloads all the articles, and at the end of download wifi gets disconnected, and I have to manually turn it back on. The logs seem to indicate that GA is trying to restore the wifi state at the end of download, and it mistakenly believes that wifi was off before the download.

[23niner]

GA has to be just about my favourite Android app. Great usability and a godsend for anyone without an unlimited mobile data allowance but with wi-fi at home. It has also turned me on to the Guardian which I had never read before. Thanks for this tremendous app.

[Tom Hume]

Thanks 23niner. I hope I'm not sounding too schmaltzy when I say that comments like this really make our day. I've passed your message onto James, who did the hard work on building this app.

[Stuart]

Not sure where to ask this, but Guraidan Anywhere seems to be downloading correctly as I see the list of new articles, but when I go to open an article I just see a blank screen. Also the downlaoding of images seems to have stopped working to.

Any suggestions would be appreciated as its such a great app

[Andrew]

Amy chance of a tablet version for Android? The Guardian themselves seem strangely devoted to Apple platforms - leaving the field vacant. Phone apps work - but are less than ideal and certainly don't exploit all that extra screen area!