Google Play / news_and_magazines / ESSENCE MAGAZINE
REVIEW
ESSENCE on Android is a legacy magazine still figuring out the app.
The print-and-festival institution for Black women has a digital companion that delivers the journalism but undersells the brand.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
ESSENCE Magazine
ESSENCE COMMUNICATIONS INC.
OUR SCORE
6.8
GOOGLE PLAY
★ 4.3
PRICE
Free
In-app purchases
ESSENCE is one of the most important Black-owned media properties in America. Founded in 1970, sold to Time Inc and then to Meredith, and finally bought back into independent Black ownership in 2018, the magazine has spent five decades being the cultural record for Black women in the United States — and a few years now being a media company that owns itself outright. The Android app is the mobile distribution layer for that journalism, and on those terms it works.
The app does not quite act like the brand it carries, though. ESSENCE has a visual identity in print and at the festival — bold covers, confident photography, a layout grid that signals editorial seriousness — and the Android reader presents the same writing through a CMS template that could belong to any regional news app. The journalism is the reason to be here. The packaging is generic.
Recommend it as a notification feed and a saved-articles drawer for ESSENCE’s reporting. The Black Women in Hollywood and Power lists, the maternal-health coverage, the political reporting, the hair-and-beauty work that nobody else does at this depth — all of that is here, free, no paywall. The cost is a heavy ad load and a reading surface that hasn’t been redesigned with the same care the print magazine gets. For the reader who values the journalism, that trade is acceptable. For ESSENCE itself, it’s an upgrade worth making.
ESSENCE is one of the most important Black-owned media properties in America. The Android app does not quite act like it.
FEATURES
ESSENCE Magazine on Android is the official mobile reader for the magazine that has covered Black women's culture, politics, beauty, fashion, and business since 1970. The app routes to essence.com's editorial stream — news features, opinion columns, beauty and hair reporting, the long-running Black Love coverage, ESSENCE Fest dispatches, the Money & Career vertical — with a tabbed top-level navigation and a saved-articles list for offline reading.
Sign-in is optional but unlocks the personalised feed, comment threads, and the newsletter subscription manager. Push notifications are configurable by section, which matters because the breaking-news and the celebrity-style verticals fire at very different cadences. Video plays inline; the player supports background audio so a feature interview keeps running when the screen locks.
Free, ad-supported, with no in-app purchases. There is no paywall on editorial content — the business model is the display ads inside articles and the cross-promotion of ESSENCE Festival of Culture, the annual New Orleans event the brand built into a separate revenue line.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The journalism is the reason to install this. ESSENCE has been independently Black-owned since the 2018 buyback from Time Inc / Meredith, and the editorial agenda has sharpened accordingly — voting-rights reporting, maternal-health coverage, the annual Black Women in Hollywood and Power lists, sustained beauty and hair coverage that no general-interest magazine matches. None of that lives anywhere else in the same depth.
Section-level push notification controls are well-implemented. The user who wants politics and money but not celebrity gossip can configure that cleanly, which is more than most legacy-magazine apps offer. Saved articles sync to the account, so a piece bookmarked on Android shows up in the iOS app and on the web.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The reading experience itself is workmanlike. Typography is fine; the headline-and-body rendering is closer to a generic CMS template than to the editorial design ESSENCE puts into its print pages. The print magazine has a visual identity — a specific photographic register, a confident layout grid, the cover treatment — and almost none of that translates into the app. Open the app cold and it could be any regional news outlet.
Ad density inside articles is heavy enough to be noticeable, with mid-article display units that occasionally relayout the page mid-scroll. The video player is reliable but the autoplay-on-scroll behaviour will frustrate anyone reading on cellular. There's no offline-issue download — the saved-articles list works one piece at a time, but the print issue itself isn't downloadable as a bundle the way Apple News+ or Zinio offer.
CONCLUSION
Install ESSENCE if you already read the magazine and want the website's reporting in a notification-friendly wrapper on your phone. The Android app is functional, not transcendent — the value is the journalism and the brand's editorial point of view, not the reading software. A more ambitious design update, and an offline-issue export for the print edition, would close the gap between what the brand represents and what the app currently delivers.