I wrote last November here in this blog “Where are my updated news apps?” and I was talking about the major Finnish media companies and their apps.

Kudos to Iltalehti

Iltalehti has now published an universal news app for Windows 10. They did have a mobile app for Windows Phone already during Windows 8.1 but they never had an app for Windows 8 PC. Now this has changed. So Windows 10 is making a difference.

Screenshot from Iltalehti Windows 10 app on tablet screen

The mobile version of the app is to my eye a bit nicer – readable. The universal app uses the mobile app as the base app and you can see it in the results. The one eye catching difference is that the mobile app has these big advertisments on every individual news page on the top and that is irritating. This is not the case on PC version.

What I like about the app as well is that on both versions they have this “ribbon” style news section of the 30 most readed news, which you can scroll from right to left. It uses an image and the headline of the news item in each box, this makes it fast to see the “important” news.

Screenshot from the news ribbon

In the apps settings you can choose your default front page view and the text size. In the Nyt-view you can choose the topics of which you want to see the news articles or don’t. Also you can change your notification setups for each news section. This is very good for the user, kudos for that as well.

Screenshot from Iltalehti Windows 10 app on smartphone

I understand that ads are a big thing and brings revenue, but somehow the presentation of the ads for the reader is always irritating at best. The optimal presentation of the ads has not been found yet (in my opinion), but it does not mean that the media companies should keep doing it like this. Try to think out-of-the-box and invent new possibilities to present the ads to the user, with better results. I never click on those ads. Think of a way to make me click on them. There is your answer.

Overall the app is not by design the best and most beautiful, but this is a big improvement what was before. The news update fast and the app is fluent. Anyway Iltalehti has closed the app gap with their Windows 10 universal app.

Hopefully they keep updating the app frequently so it will improve in time to be an even better app.

Updated 19.1.2016: Now the same ads are also in the PC version. So they are both equal in content.

You can download the app from Windows Store.

Related posts:

• Where are my updated news apps?