The free Pope App [Apple and Android] can, at times, be incredibly insensitive to users looking for timely information. Today is a good example. The Apostolic Exhortation, Amoris Laetitia (The Joy of Love), the highly anticipated document synthesizing the work of two synods on the family in 2014 and 2015, was released earlier today. One would expect this document to be in-your-face important to the folks who run the PopeApp. I guess not.
Here’s what the app makes you do to find the link: Clicking the “More” tab, then “+Vaticano” tab, then “Vatican Radio” in the listing. From there it takes you to Vatican Radio’s web site in your browser where you open the news story on the document. Within that, you can see the link to the document itself, which is just a link to the Vatican site that you could have accessed via the browser on your mobile device to begin with. And, more annoying, the text is offered in a pdf format for mobile devices, but that didn’t download onto our smart phone.
So, the obvious question is: what’s the point of the Pope App when it doesn’t serve you the text up front, in a timely manner, in a format readable on a mobile device?
Like most people accessing the app this morning, I was ready to dive into all nine chapters broken into more than 300 paragraphs and gobs of footnotes. Bring it on.
Today’s review of THE app we expect to be on top of vital communications from the Pope such as this? …disappointing.
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