Jason Pontin, editor in chief and publisher of Technology Review:
The paid, expensively developed publishers’ app, with its extravagantly produced digital replica, is dead.
I’d say that the magazine app was only alive for about one issue (if that).
I hated every moment of our experiment with apps, because it tried to impose something closed, old, and printlike on something open, new, and digital.
The magazine app seemed alive only during that brief moment when the iPad was brand new and it was a novelty to have your favorite magazine available on your new tablet. But then you realized that it took up a lot of space, was slow to download on demand, and was not as easy to read as an article in Instapaper.