Good news everybody ...
I've been very angry about the Economist App performance this year, particularly how much it was crashing. I was having to do a factory reset on my tablet every 8 weeks to get a decent experience reading the magazine on my tablet. I am very pleased to say that things seem to have significantly improved however.
There was an update sometime in early November I think and since then it feels a little more responsive and also much more stable. So far, I have really noticed it behaving better. Now the ratings and comments I see on the Play Store are still quite bad but, for me, it seems like the update has fixed the biggest issues I had. I'm still cautious of course, but I am happy to report this. I should rate and comment about this on the "store" sometime soon as well.