I check the news on my iPhone relatively frequently. I likely use the FoxNews one most often. (Now when people here "Fox news" they think of a conservative slant, but I very rarely will pay attention to any of their opinion pieces - this is just the basic news side). I've found the same problems with other news apps, but I thought I'd be specific.
I've seen titles like "This Blue City has ....", when it'd be easier and shorter to just say "Boston", or "Chicago". Today I see "Beer Giant drops $600M on ..."; turns out after a click it's Anheuser-Busch. Whoever is writing these headlines is deliberately obscuring what they mean - I can only presume it's to get a "click". But if any of those ambiguous phrases isn't related to anything I care about, I immediately go back to the main page with some degree of annoyance. If they think they're accomplishing something (like eyeballs on ads) they're not. Perhaps 'payment by click' is sort of a thing, but I'm not clicking on any ads, just story headlines.
There are days when I'm glancing at the app that I see so much of this I just close the thing and go to another site. It's actively trying to waste my time. My ideal is kind of like the WSJ front page - brief summaries with enough info for you to decide if you want to read further, and a link to the page and column to do so. Overall I (and I expect many others) would spend more time on the app if it efficiently provided what we want.
Another complaint (bleat?) is the presentation of ads. They're what a friend called "in your face" advertising - not something along the top or bottom, but pop-ups, often full-screen, that you have to watch for a set time. I don't. I just exit the app. It's not like major news stories are unique to one news source.
If enough of us complain about this it might change.
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