ABC News: Breaking News Live

The ABC News app loads. Then it stops. Then it loads again. That pattern repeats for a lot of people who just want to check the headlines. The home screen shows a live blog banner and a breaking news bar, but getting past that initial screen is where the trouble starts. Users have reported waiting a long time for the main page to appear, only to see a loading spinner that never goes away. When the app does finally open, the video player often refuses to cooperate. Tapping the play button or the live stream button sometimes just produces a spinning circle that spins indefinitely. This is not a rare occurrence. It happens across multiple devices and multiple updates. The app is free, which is good, but the technical friction is real. Once you get past the loading hurdles, the interface is relatively clean. The home screen prioritizes top stories with a clear layout. Politics, economy, health, and business categories are easy to find. The app offers a dark mode, which was a highly requested feature for years before it finally arrived. But even with dark mode enabled, the core experience remains fragile.

The live stream and the notification system do not play well together

The app's two biggest selling points are the 24/7 live news stream and the personalized push alerts. On paper, they work together. You get an alert about a breaking story, you tap it, and the app opens to that story. In practice, the interaction is clunky. Users who enable push notifications for breaking news often find that the app's autoplay video ads interrupt the live stream experience. The ads play with sound, and they cannot be skipped. If you are watching a live broadcast and an ad starts, you have to wait. If you scroll down to read a text story while the live stream is playing in a small window, the video ad might still autoplay and blast audio over whatever you are reading. The notification system itself is straightforward. You can toggle alerts for breaking news, state news, and specific topics. The problem is not the notification setup. The problem is what happens after you act on the notification. The app does not always take you to the correct story. Sometimes it opens to the home screen. Sometimes it opens to a blank screen. The combination of these two features creates a workflow that feels unfinished.

The audio glitch that makes people think their phone is hacked

There is a bug in this app that is genuinely unsettling. Multiple users have reported that the ABC News app starts playing audio on its own when the app is closed. The phone is locked. The app is not running in the foreground. But suddenly, a narrator's voice comes through the speaker, talking about news stories or sometimes preaching about the word of God. The audio continues even after you kill all apps. It continues even after you lock the phone. The only way to stop it is to reboot the device. This has been going on for at least a year, according to user reviews. The audio can drain the battery and use mobile data without the user knowing. Users have deleted the app because of this glitch. They thought their phone was possessed or hacked. The bug is frightening because it is not clear that the audio is coming from the ABC News app. There is no visual indication. No notification. Just a voice coming out of nowhere. This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a serious flaw that erodes trust in the app. Disney, which owns ABC News, has not publicly commented on this specific bug, but the issue persists across multiple versions.

What the updates actually change

The developer has not published a specific changelog for the current version. The Play Store listing does not show any "What's New" section. This means users have no idea what changed in the latest update. They install the update and hope for the best. Sometimes the app works better. Sometimes it crashes more. Users have complained about constant updates that do not seem to fix the underlying problems. One user wrote that the updates are "wearing me out" and predicted that the constant updates would drive people away. The app does receive regular version bumps. APKMirror shows versions ranging from 8.59.0 to 8.90.0, with file sizes varying from 24 MB to 56 MB. But the changelog for most of these versions is either missing or contains generic phrases like "bug fixes and improvements behind the scenes". Without a proper changelog, users are left guessing. They do not know if the audio glitch has been fixed. They do not know if the video player has been improved. The lack of transparency is itself a problem. It signals that the developer either does not care about communicating with users or does not have a clear roadmap for fixing the issues. The app's reliance on Nielsen's proprietary measurement software also raises privacy questions. The software contributes to market research, including TV ratings. Users are not given a clear option to opt out within the app.