The Edge Financial Daily app for smartphones and tablets

Digital format of The Edge Financial Daily business paper has been made available to smart mobile devices including iPad, iPhone, iPod, Android smartphones and Android tablets for quite some times.

It is delivered with the free The Edge Financial Daily app available in Google Play Store and iTune AppStore. Currently, the digital format of the paper can be downloaded for free too.

However, this app doesn't bring good and convenient user experience to its readers yet, and still need quite a lot of improvement.

• The app is running on Adobe AIR, which requires user to install Adobe AIR app before able to run The Edge Financial Daily app. Adobe AIR consumes about 9 MB of storage space of your smartphone/tablet.
• Before we are able to read the paper, we need to download it from the Internet. The file size is around 30 MB per paper, taking some times to download, and consuming quite a lot of precious storage space of your smartphone/tablet too. Worse still if you are not connecting to the Internet via WiFi or HSDPA and need to download with slow speed, it really tests your patient.
• Probably because it is an Adobe AIR app instead of native app, its navigation respond is sluggish, page loading and rendering is slow too.
• The navigation buttons don't respond well. Sometimes need to tap a few times before it start working.
• It does not support multi-touch gesture. To zoom the text, you need to double tap the screen instead of pinching.
• I don't find any feature to jump to a particular page. Everytime you open the paper, you need to start reading from its cover page.
• Deleting the downloaded papers (especially to save valuable storage space) is a pain. There is no multi-select deletion. You need to delete the files one by one, and each deletion takes a few steps to complete.

It is very nice to be able to read the digital format of The Edge Financial Daily anytime, anywhere with our smart mobile devices. With this digital format delivered through the Internet, we no longer need to look for the paper in newspaper stand, or need to wait for the paper boy to deliver at our doorstep. Being paperless, it is environmental friendly too.

However, it would be better if the app can be redeveloped as native app instead of using Adobe AIR, optimize on the download time and file size, and improve on user interface and experience.