Readly UK Reviews 2,150

I have been using Readly for many years and I was absolutely happy until the change to the new App, what a disaster. This is going back to Stone Age. How can you not inform the readers. With the change all my downloads were lost. The biggest complaint is that Auto-download is not working anymore. If you not change fast and react to all the negative comments, you will lose readers and then magazines. This would be a disaster because the idea of Readly is fantastic.

New App is awful. Please listen to subscribers feedback and do something.

Had for 9 years & now changed overnight.
Seems more restricted but to be honest I haven’t used it much as I really can’t be bothered to learn a new app for something I already had!
Perhaps I’ll check back in the autumn when I’m bored.

Wondered why the site was so difficult to navigate, then saw the reviews here. I am also very unhappy with the new look Readly. It was so much better before!

I think that the new Readly is improving, I’m beginning to enjoy it again. Please keep up the good work.
I have only given 4 stars because I still really miss using the puzzle books.

Latest update means you can no longer complete puzzles in the app. Not good!

I've tried to cancel this and it just keeps saying 'something went wrong'. Contacted customer service who asked me why I wanted to cancel but don't appear to have actually cancelled it. Steer clear it's impossible to cancel

Update - Since the response from Readly below I've had another email from 'Camille'. She says she cannot guarantee it will be cancelled before the next payment is due and suggests to do it myself. Ive tried and it takes me to play store where I don't have any active subscriptions. Now escalated to formal complaint.

I have tried to cancel my subscription during the free trial period on the Readly website. I logged in to my Readly account and followed instructions to cancel subscription. but I am 'unable to cancel' right now. Readly offer an apology in advance if money leaves my account. Meanwhile, they suggest if money is taken, I should request a refund! Cafeyn have sent an automated reply to my request. Not confident my request will be dealt with!

Two weeks in to using this new app and I absolutely hate it.
All my bookmarks should supposedly have been migrated, but out of the hundreds I’d saved there are only about a dozen. Whether this is because I had tagged most of them with meaningful names I don’t know, but they’re gone, and there is no way of me being able to find the articles I’d saved.
The app is really unintuitive, and goodness knows how people are supposed to navigate it.
Publications often take ages to load so you get odd pages missing, or even just half the magazine. Pages freeze when you’re reading so you can’t move on to the next page or exit the publication altogether.
In many cases the app is now little more than a PDF reader, so clicking on a url within a magazine no longer takes you to the web site - a feature I used often in the old version.
Do this company not understand that web apps are supposed to be designed with accessibility in mind?
With 30 odd years in IT development behind me, I can honestly say that if I or one of my team had released this utter rubbish we’d have deserved sacking. It wouldn’t even pass as a beta version.
How dare they try to sell it as an improvement?

Update: 2/5/26
Still can't see anything beyond page 88 on Saturday's Guardian. The tabs at the bottom of the screen are all wrong - they don't relate o the content they suggest. I've been complaining about this for weeks and you say you'll bring it to the attention of your technical team. Please wake them up and DO something about it!
Post the Cafeyn takeover, the web version of Readly is a disaster. Navigation is clunky, can't find favourites but worst of all, some papers don't show all pages eg Saturday's edition of the Guardian only has the first 88 pages so over 100 pages are missing. Readly/Cafeyn provided really helpful advice - log out, delete cookies, log in. Didn't work.

I used to love readly and would have given it five stars but the new app takes a huge backwards step making it clunky and difficult to browse

Awful ''update'' , can't now use on Amazon tablet, all downloaded issues disappeared, user experience is just rubbish

Latest update...not impressed ..layout completely different. Hard to navigate...Will be cancelling. Shame as loved the previous app set up amd was a member for years

What a farce the new app is. Can't interactively use touch screen entry for puzzles any more in magazines and newspapers. Yet they even list puzzle and crossword publications which can't be used so what. S the point. If it isn't corrected soon I will be cancelling after several years as a customer!

I have been a happy Readly user for many years. Their service was great, everything worked well, and on the few occasions there were glitches, emails to Customer Support were also responded to within hours, always with positive resolution.

So it is so disappointing that they have burned up so much goodwill in the space of a couple of weeks - not only due to technical failures in the migration but in their refusal, almost two weeks later, to acknowledge any problem, never mind apologise formally to the user base.

I am one of the many people whose favourites and bookmarks, built up over many years, were lost in the migration. My experience was quoted in the article published last week in Press Gazette (easily found in a Google Search, TrustPilot does not allow links).

The article includes a quote from the owners claiming "97% of users successfully accessing the new app during migration." I suspect that figure refers to people who were able just to log in, and that the number of people who, like me, lost their favourites and bookmarks, is higher.

Either way, Cafeyn has refused to acknowledge the problem that has affected some users. Many of the (presumably AI-generated) responses from Readly below encourage users to get in touch with Support. I did that, on 16 April, sending screen shots to show the missing Favourites, and have not had a reply in the last 11 days. So much for taking users' problems seriously.

This was a superb app but the update has been a huge step back. Saved magazines have disappeared, navigation is next to impossible and the whole experience is now rubbish. Was this even tested?
EDIT: have cancelled my subscription. What a shame.

I was a big fan of Readly, but then came the merger and it’s all gone down hill. I sent a message to Readly via social media about this - no response - they don’t care. This new version is several steps backwards - I will not be continuing with my subscription.

Used to love readly but since it merged with cafeyn it's terrible.
Quality is awful. Its hard to navigate. I hate it.

The new app has taken something easy to use and useful to something impossible to navigate and dreadful.

The search function is now completely useless, failing to find information or names from within any publications. As this is the main reason I subscribe I will be cancelling.

I am genuinely at a loss at how they could have made this update any worse.

The new app is absolutely rubbish. It’s not user friendly & I’m seriously considering cancelling my subscription. I don’t see why it had to change especially as I can’t see any benefits. I can’t always read my favourites as they are released but was able to see which ones I’d read & would catch up when able, that is not possible now. Not being able to do the crosswords is a major issue for me.
Currently searching for an alternative app.