And then there’s Time magazine, whose designers must have inhaled a little too much of the ink fumes from the old days. Its design is an incomprehensible mess. Sometimes you swipe horizontally to turn pages. Sometimes articles scroll vertically, as though printed on a roll of toilet paper. (In those situations, there are no page boundaries, so you can’t do a quick “next page” swipe; you must drag the text up by just the right amount.) Sometimes there’s no text at all, but a redundant “Tap to Read” button.

“Scroll to Read More” notes appear at the bottom of each screen — even if you’re already at the end of an article. Worst of all, the usual navigation bar and carousel scroller don’t appear when you tap, as they do in all the other magazines.

Next Issue makes much of the fact that bonus materials, links and even videos may appear in some magazines, but they’re rare. In Fortune, I found a couple of Web links that revealed financial data about companies mentioned; in People, there were quite a few bonus videos and supplementary materials.

Digital magazines are big files — as big as 400 megabytes an issue — so the app’s designers have bent over backward to make sure you’re downloading and keeping only the issues you want. You can designate up to 12 magazines to download automatically when they’re published (why only 12?). You can limit the amount of your tablet’s storage that’s dedicated to magazines; after that threshold is reached, the app deletes older issues automatically. You can “pin” certain magazines to prevent that auto-deletion.

Nicely enough, you can start reading an article before an entire issue has been downloaded. The app downloads the article you want first, and then finishes the rest of the issue in the background.

Another innovative feature: you can tap an article’s cover blurb (“Lose 100 pounds in 10 minutes!” “Justin Bieber’s hot new socks!”) to jump directly to that article inside. Try that with the printed edition.