The EastAfrican newspaper has a nice website that has most of the stories in the newspaper. But for some people, they still need and want to read the actual paper. This is because a great deal of value from reading a newspaper can be derived from items that are usually not posted online such as paid notices and advertisements.

Or sometimes, as a fan of the EastAfrican you’re not able to get a physical copy – you may have traveled somewhere that’s far from a supermarket or distributor of the newspaper. It may also be unavailable for some other reason e.g. there’s a temporary ban on the sale of the EastAfrican now in Tanzania as the newspaper is perceived to have offended either the President or the Government.

In such circumstances, you can still get the full experience of the EastAfrican as it’s available for users on Android and IOS platforms as an e-paper app to download but not yet on Windows. New issues of the weekly newspapers are made available to download on Monday morning and takes about 2- 10 minutes to download on a WiFi (it took 2 minutes to download via a Safaricom 3G today), and get to read it offline.

After download, you get a full-color layout of all the pages as they appear in the actual EastAfrican newspaper. Like with Zinio and NewsStand, it has all pages in full sequence, page by page, with the layouts, advertisements, supplements, and stories exactly as they appear in the actual newspaper.

You can also search through stories for keywords, even words that appear in advertisements but that does not get a 100% hit rate. Still, it’s better to search than flipping through all 60 pages of a typical paper, and you can also zoom in for stories, or jump through the different parts of the EastAfrican like the magazine, markets, business, outlook, opinion, and news sections.

There is also a savings opportunity from using the app. While a newspaper is about Kshs 100 per week in Kenya  (so 400 – 500 ($5.5) per month depending on the number of issues), the online one costs $4 per month or $50 per year. This is after a two-week free trial period for people who download the app. Subsequent payments can be made by credit card, debit card, M-pesa or cash.  Subscribers get notified of new issues of the EastAfrican every Monday morning when the new EastAfrican newspaper is uploaded. The newspaper is sold at different prices in Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi, but the app price is always the same.