“A poorly designed app. A disservice to its journalists and readers. — Do you love clicking on an article and instead being forced to watch a pop up video of rotisserie chicken? I don’t mean an ad where it ends and then sends you to the…”
Independent automated assessment · 3 signal sources · 502 reviews scanned · analyzed 2026-10-04.
4.5 ★14,530 ratings
—Downloads
12+Age rating
109 MBApp size
FreeIn-app purchases
About this app
Know more about Houston with the Houston Chronicle app. Stay informed with trusted journalism wherever you are. • Get Houston news alerts and notifications, customized by preferred topics • Catch high school football, college sports, and Astros, Texans, Rockets coverage • Stay on top of Texas news, politics, business, food and development stories • Tune in to the politics podcast Texas Take and sports podcast Fifth Down for expert analysis • Page through the e-Edition, a digital replica of the newspaper • Stay sharp with Puzzmo’s reimagined favorites and brand-new puzzles • Listen to Chronicle stories with Everlit, a text-to-audio tool • Check out exclusive guides and compelling columns and commentary
SUBSCRIPTION DETAILS: • Subscribe for unlimited digital access to the app, HoustonChronicle.com, e-Edition and newsletters. Get 1 month free, then $14.99 per month.…
Preview
Real screenshots from the store listing.
Independent evidence report
Evidence and review signals
This is where the page changes from an app-store listing into an evidence report: findings, important reviews, pricing and a dated history.
Which version this describes
When we ran this analysis, and what the store lists now.
This analysis describes version 202608.55 of the app, analyzed 2026-10-04 . The app may have changed since.
The store currently lists version 202608.55, updated 2026-08-31.
What we measured
Each line is a measurement published as a measurement, never a verdict.
Each line is a measurement, published as a measurement. Where we have not looked, the line says so rather than reading as a zero.
Developer replies to reviews
Replies to fewer than 1 review in 20
Price in the store description
States a price and a billing period
Cancelling, in the store description
Says how to cancel
Themes reported by reviewers
1 theme reported
Counted from the reviews we have read for this app. "No theme reported" means no theme reached our reporting threshold — it is not a finding that nothing is wrong with this app, and we do not say it is.
Five-star share of ratings
65–79% five-star
Arithmetic on the stores' own published rating counts. It says nothing about why the ratings fall where they do.
In the package we scanned
No package has been scanned for this app, so nothing is published about what it ships. That is an absence of evidence about the app, not a finding about it.
Graded bands · predicate set 1.4 · how these are measured
What the analysis found
App-specific findings, grouped by what each one rests on. How they are graded lives on its own page.
One source only — shown, not confirmed 1
A single kind of evidence. We publish these because withholding them would be the bigger distortion, and we do not treat any of them as a finding we stand behind.
Reported by users: Aggressive ad load
Advertising volume or placement that interrupts normal use: ads between every action, unskippable or forced full-screen ads.
What we saw: Aggressive ad load: raised by 6 distinct reviewers (1.2% of 502 reviews scanned)
Highlighted reviews
Representative public review excerpts shown as user reports, not Appworthy audit evidence.
“Every change is a new mess! — The latest attempt at design is the worst yet. Old stories dominate while the current news is relegated to a text list in smaller print. I’m going to see if I can access on chron.com instead of this…”
“Frustrating & Almost Unusable — For multiple versions including the current version the app often takes 20-30 sec to load, often freezes when it does load, and often freezes when moving from one article to another. The only thing that…”
Assessment & version history
App changes and Appworthy events in one timeline.
Store listing updated to version 202608.55.
What this app sells
Useful store-disclosed pricing, kept below the app listing.
Business modelFree
Prices and terms as disclosed by the store listing.