Radio New Zealand

When listening to live radio it cuts in and out constantly. The persistent issue has put me off listening to RNZ live Makes listening to the news, weather or interesting interviews pointless. Have reinstalled the app multiple times with the same result. The issue is Not my phone because I stream Spotify, YouTube, audio books and radio stations from around the world with out any issues.

I want to love the app and I really appreciate the service it is trying for, but it almost unusable. It constantly stops and won't restart playing. When I pause it or stop my car the show won't start back up. Only restarting my phone will make the play button work again. I'm also a bit fed up with the notifications so I'll be turning those off.

I like this app, but since my phone's last software update it will no longer open from its notifications. Someone else reviewing here recently had that issue too. I'd like to be able to zoom in on photos, or have a link to open the story in the browser so I can do that there. I'd also like more nuanced control of alerts e.g. to be able to exclude breaking news about sport!

Just recently I've found the app stops running in the background after 3 minutes or so. Up until now it's been great.

Drops out and buffers to the point of being unusable. Can see a response to similar review to update to most recent app version. 🙄 I am using the most recent version. Hopeless app.

Something is wrong with the app. It wont load any articals. It endlessly buffers with a circle. The list of articals loads but when you click a story you justt get a blank page

Amazing and intuitive interface, live radio automatically change program and excellent quality audio👍🏽

Love RNZ, always producing great New Zealand content. The app is ok. My one complaint would be that it really needs to have a "download only on wi-fi" feature. When downloading audio for offline listening it usually takes a while to do so and is easy to forget about as it downloads in the background. The problem is it doesn't stop when your connection changes and a few times now it has burnt through all the data in my plan!! Quite frustrating when this happens but otherwise a decent app.

App is fine - it's readable and clear, images look good and easy navigate. The reason for the low star rating is because of the cacophony of notifications it spams you with. This wouldn't be a problem, usually, and I've turned off notifications for everything except breaking news - yet it still notifies me about the most pointless and mundane news stories of the day. It seems RNZ doesn't know what "breaking news" is and uses the notifications to drive clicks to their articles.

I have been using the RNZ app for nearly a year now. Until yesterday, it was excellent. The app worked perfectly and the content (especially Saturday and Sunday morning) is generally very interesting. Yesterday, the app stopped working. It is not the wifi. I uninstalled it and reinstalled it and it still does not work. I miss it already.

Great news, programmes, but really useless app. Clunky. It cuts out after a few minutes, and won't let you start again where you left off. Also there is no way to delete sports content (as if we don't have enough sport rammed down our throats already) or to change preferences once they are set. The My Programmes setting doesn't seem to allow cleaning out. Needs greater ability to personalise and change selected settings. I'd give it no stars if I could.

Great public news source, and the app is a great hub for having text, live radio and programmes all in one place. Most annoying thing right now is multiple breaking news alerts on COVID only taking you to the "live COVID Updates page". If you click on these when you get the alert, it's usually too soon for any info on the notification item to be there. If you click it later, the info on the notification item is long gone. I'm probably going to turn off notifications at this rate.

Not bad, but one frustrating thing about it is that it sends notifications about interesting articles, except when you click on them instead of taking you to the article itself, you're taken to the main news page (and often the article in question is really hard to find there). I almost never click on article notifications now because of this, but if this were fixed I'd definitely do it a lot more .

Really great app when it works. Unfortnately it regularly stops working... just the dreaded spinning wheel... and has to be closed and reopened to get it working again. Could really do with landscape mode, especially when trying to view images... frustrating. I see a reply to another persons rating, suggesting they update to the latest version of android. Well that's fine if you've got a new phone but a lot of us have perfectly servicable older phones that won't get the latest updates.

The app is great and improving! It's very smooth and the design is intuitive. I have a few features that I'd love for convenience: A dark mode, to make the background a dark colour and the text a light colour, because it would be much more comfortable to use in the dark, and A toggle so that the app only shows articles with audio options, only shows text articles, or shows both. No problems here so far, only a few quality of life improvements!

I use this app lots. It's great for reading and finding audio content, but: (1) As some others mention, sometimes live streams just suddenly stop (I'm on Android 10). I thought this could be WiFi reception, but I addressed that and it's still happening. (2) I've only enabled breaking news alerts, but RNZ decides this means interrupting me several times a day for stuff that easily could have waited until I next checked the news. eg. "Budget to be released later today" hasn't even happened yet.

Good, BUT can't use on tablet properly as its stuck in Portrait mode for phones only! Why Oh Why do they not think things through and just assume 'oh everybody uses it on a phone.' No I have a keyboard on the tablet so its almost ALWAYS in Landscape mode... better for me. Just present according to the devices orientation. Plenty of other news apps do this automatically.

This is the most frustrating app I have on my OnePlus 6 running Android 10.3.6. While not using the app it always reminds me in the visible notifications bar that it's running in the background. I have to force stop it regularly. Will likely uninstall if I can't work it out. When I'm using the app it works well, as expected.

Excellent when it works but only some times/days. Other times intermittently stops or buffers, regardless of: 1) good data signal, 2) whether or not connected to private WIFI systems, or 3) whether phone display on or off. Other streaming services perform consistently OK. Can't find any setting within RNZ app to fix this problem!

Excellent content, but after playing from my queue through Andriod Auto you have to restart you phone to get the app to play again. Stopping and restarting the app does not work. You have to restart the phone. Please Fix! I have an Samsung S21 Ultra. The has full wifi and cellular, but once it freezes you can not play download content to your device. Other apps still work, eg YouTube, but RNZ app remains locked.

Had to clear the cache on the app, as the app was 2GB big after a year of usage. Would be great if it would not cache all podcast.

Despite having several short comings, the RNZ App is worth having. e.g. Why is there no schedule? Excellent access to news, saves turning the TV on!

A hugely inconsistant app. The journalism is great, but I generally cannot access it due to the endless spinning loading sign. Some articles open fine, others never at all. Must be something going wrong in the back end since this happens consistantly and on numerous different connections. Update - 6 months later - still shoddy

Not usable unfortunately. Audio stops every minute or two despite reinstalling three times.

Lots of content but slow, jerky and unreliable. Just a terrible app. RNZ deserve better. Edit: that was my experience with ADSL 2+ but now I'm on Gigabit Internet and the app fails to initialise. It just hangs on startup but if I switch to 4G mobile it starts fine and continues if I switch back to wifi. The developers of this app should be ashamed of the poor job they've done. They should have fixed these sorts of bugs by now. This app is completely unusable on Wifi now. Hopeless.