I am a big fan of NPR, especially Wait Wait Don't Tell me and Car Talk. I usually use TuneIn Radio as my go-to app for listening to NPR on my phone, but after finding this official NPR app I thought I'd try it out.

DESIGN
The app has a very clean look with big buttons along the bottom and intuitive tabs along the top that allows for quick access to your listening history, currently playing and upcoming programs. If you click on the "hamburger" icon, you'll see additional features like sleep timer, feedback, donation and suggestions, which is a cool feature where the app recommends new things based on your past listening history. The overall design is minimalist and attractive, and on an almost three year old HTC One M7, the app runs smoothly with no delays or hiccups.

ADD-ONS & PERMISSIONS
The permissions required by this app from my testing matches the list on the Amazon store page. They are overall harmless, including the coarse GPS location request, which is most likely used to find your local NPR station. All the read and write access to storage is most likely used for the extensive cache scheme used by the app to ensure smooth streaming. I noticed this while looking at the app size on my phone. It took up about 13MB, which isn't bad. But after about 30 min of listening, the app cache had accumulated about 38MB. I cleared this while the app was playing and it didn't show any ill effect.

The only add-ons were Google mobile ads and Google analytics. I didn't encounter any ads while using the app, which was a pleasant surprise. So maybe the mobile ads module is just dormant or extraneous. The analytics module is so the developer can analyze anonymous usage patterns and tweak and adjust the app in future releases.

POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
There were two issues. First, it's not clear how to exit out of the app. Pressing back doesn't do it completely, as the circle icon still shows up in my notification area. Took me a while to figure out - you have to click pause in the notification area control first to trigger the close button to show up. I hope NPR will make it easier to close in an update.

Second, the app uses a lot of data. I think this is because it caches everything to ensure a smooth playback, which is great and I love it. But this might be an issue if you're on a limited data plan, which is most folks nowadays, and listening on the go using your mobile data.

SUMMARY
This is a very well designed app, with a clean and attractive user interface and smooth streaming even on older devices. It's dedicated to NPR and nothing else. If you're a NPR fan, definitely check this out.

Brand	N/A
Rating	4.1 (896 ratings)
Price	$N/A
Category	Podcasts

NPR One