There’s a lot to evaluate about Apple’s new News Plus subscription service, including if it’s a good deal for the media business and forecasting how much of an existential threat it poses to an already at-risk industry. But inherent to those debates is whether iOS users actually use the service and find enough value in it to pay for it in the long run. Does it provide a decent user experience, and is it worth the $10-a-month subscription fee, considering it doesn’t offer you a whole lot of actual hard news?
I’ve spent the past week using Apple News Plus. It launched last Monday as the only fully materialized product from Apple’s big media and services event that was designed to gin up hype for its post-iPhone future. While it certainly has its weird design quirks, I will say that for $10 a month, News Plus is the most comprehensive magazine subscription service on the market. (Scribd is a very solid alternative for non-iOS users.)
If you’re thinking about subscribing, that — and only that — is what you should be focused on: getting a service designed mostly for magazines. For some customers, unfettered access to new issues of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wired, and hundreds more could be well worth the cost, and I would have to agree. But there are a lot of caveats, and we’ll get to those.
That the company delivered a strong magazine experience should come as no surprise, considering Apple based the entire product on the offering of Texture, a Netflix-for-magazines startup it acquired last year and retooled into the premium Apple News tier. Apple News Plus has many of the same deals in place that Texture originally secured, including ones with mammoth publishing brands like Condé Nast, Time Inc. owner Meredith Corporation, and Hearst.
Many of those magazines already published stories in some form or another on Apple News, but now you get full print issues as downloadable files in either the company’s Apple News Format or in something closer to the PDF-style files magazines began using when the iPad first launched. (According to MacStories, a little less than half of all available magazines in the service are using Apple News Format, or ANF, meaning they can make use of more complex mobile and tablet-specific layout options.)
For those on the fence, the question of whether to pay for Apple News Plus depends, primarily, on if you like reading magazines enough to fork over $120 a year for access to more than you’ll ever be able to reliably consume. Going one step further, how you like to have your news delivered will also greatly impact how valuable this service is to you. Do you prefer standard Apple News’ mix of algorithmic and human curation, or would rather manually select individual stories as you browse a collection, which is arguably what News Plus is better at? To make those determinations, it’s best to tackle Apple News Plus by evaluating its core pillars: its design, its news delivery mechanisms, and the overall value.
DESIGN AND DELIVERY
With the update to iOS 12.2, Apple News Plus now sits in its own dedicated center tab on the mobile app. Opening it up makes clear what you’re getting and why you should be subscribing, with a large “Magazines” header up at the very top, followed by catalog browsing options and a carousel of the latest issues of the magazines you follow. It’s spartan and simple, and Apple makes it pretty easy to browse the entire catalog of 250-plus magazines and also jump into category-specific lists.
But that’s roughly where the good design ends and the frustrations begin. There’s a moderate amount of recommendations and curation going on in the background as you scroll through the News Plus tab, but what you’re seeing and why feels so opaque and scattershot that it’s not really useful. While the service is great as an all-you-can-read buffet, Apple does very little to help readers maneuver the massive mountain of magazines they now have access to. You’re better off just tapping the like button on the five to 10 magazines you’re interested in reading every week or month and just perusing the new issues list.
When it comes to the reading experience, the lack of standardization across publications makes it difficult to know what you’re getting into when you download an issue of a magazine you’re not familiar with. The density of the interface makes reading and maneuvering from an issue’s table of contents to an article page and to the publication hub a total pain. Regardless of whether a magazine is using ANF or PDF-style file formats, I find myself too often encountering badly translated articles that were never designed to be read on a phone screen, with plain, clunky page designs.
The closest thing to a thoughtfully designed layout is the text-heavy magazines, like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, that simply rely on drop caps, the occasional photo, and a pull quote or two to spruce up the page. That these no-frills layouts are preferable speaks to how much work Apple still has to do on the design side, both with the tools it provides publishers and with the ways it organizes information on the main News Plus tab, to make this a product worthy of being part of the company’s new slate of premium services.
As you start to scroll down, you’ll begin to notice the first of many annoying design quirks. Apple News Plus doesn’t let you follow magazines by clicking on them from the News Plus tab. Instead, you have to tab over to the “Follow” section, search for the magazine by name, and tap the heart icon. That way, it will show up in the carousel of recent issues. If you want to browse past issues of a magazine, you need to tap the logo at the top of the screen to be brought to that magazine’s homepage of sorts, where you’ll see a list of recent issues you can page through and download at the top.
Tapping into a magazine gets you a rudimentary table of contents that’s specially designed for Apple News Plus. Despite that custom treatment, it varies wildly from publication to publication, and even in its best, most detailed format, you’re getting only section headers and the occasional byline underneath. Some versions, as is the case with most of the available Condé magazines, feature just a list of print headlines, devoid of context.
I’ve spent the past week using Apple News Plus. It launched last Monday as the only fully materialized product from Apple’s big media and services event that was designed to gin up hype for its post-iPhone future. While it certainly has its weird design quirks, I will say that for $10 a month, News Plus is the most comprehensive magazine subscription service on the market. (Scribd is a very solid alternative for non-iOS users.)
If you’re thinking about subscribing, that — and only that — is what you should be focused on: getting a service designed mostly for magazines. For some customers, unfettered access to new issues of The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Wired, and hundreds more could be well worth the cost, and I would have to agree. But there are a lot of caveats, and we’ll get to those.
That the company delivered a strong magazine experience should come as no surprise, considering Apple based the entire product on the offering of Texture, a Netflix-for-magazines startup it acquired last year and retooled into the premium Apple News tier. Apple News Plus has many of the same deals in place that Texture originally secured, including ones with mammoth publishing brands like Condé Nast, Time Inc. owner Meredith Corporation, and Hearst.
Many of those magazines already published stories in some form or another on Apple News, but now you get full print issues as downloadable files in either the company’s Apple News Format or in something closer to the PDF-style files magazines began using when the iPad first launched. (According to MacStories, a little less than half of all available magazines in the service are using Apple News Format, or ANF, meaning they can make use of more complex mobile and tablet-specific layout options.)
For those on the fence, the question of whether to pay for Apple News Plus depends, primarily, on if you like reading magazines enough to fork over $120 a year for access to more than you’ll ever be able to reliably consume. Going one step further, how you like to have your news delivered will also greatly impact how valuable this service is to you. Do you prefer standard Apple News’ mix of algorithmic and human curation, or would rather manually select individual stories as you browse a collection, which is arguably what News Plus is better at? To make those determinations, it’s best to tackle Apple News Plus by evaluating its core pillars: its design, its news delivery mechanisms, and the overall value.
DESIGN AND DELIVERY
With the update to iOS 12.2, Apple News Plus now sits in its own dedicated center tab on the mobile app. Opening it up makes clear what you’re getting and why you should be subscribing, with a large “Magazines” header up at the very top, followed by catalog browsing options and a carousel of the latest issues of the magazines you follow. It’s spartan and simple, and Apple makes it pretty easy to browse the entire catalog of 250-plus magazines and also jump into category-specific lists.
But that’s roughly where the good design ends and the frustrations begin. There’s a moderate amount of recommendations and curation going on in the background as you scroll through the News Plus tab, but what you’re seeing and why feels so opaque and scattershot that it’s not really useful. While the service is great as an all-you-can-read buffet, Apple does very little to help readers maneuver the massive mountain of magazines they now have access to. You’re better off just tapping the like button on the five to 10 magazines you’re interested in reading every week or month and just perusing the new issues list.
When it comes to the reading experience, the lack of standardization across publications makes it difficult to know what you’re getting into when you download an issue of a magazine you’re not familiar with. The density of the interface makes reading and maneuvering from an issue’s table of contents to an article page and to the publication hub a total pain. Regardless of whether a magazine is using ANF or PDF-style file formats, I find myself too often encountering badly translated articles that were never designed to be read on a phone screen, with plain, clunky page designs.
The closest thing to a thoughtfully designed layout is the text-heavy magazines, like The New Yorker and The Atlantic, that simply rely on drop caps, the occasional photo, and a pull quote or two to spruce up the page. That these no-frills layouts are preferable speaks to how much work Apple still has to do on the design side, both with the tools it provides publishers and with the ways it organizes information on the main News Plus tab, to make this a product worthy of being part of the company’s new slate of premium services.
As you start to scroll down, you’ll begin to notice the first of many annoying design quirks. Apple News Plus doesn’t let you follow magazines by clicking on them from the News Plus tab. Instead, you have to tab over to the “Follow” section, search for the magazine by name, and tap the heart icon. That way, it will show up in the carousel of recent issues. If you want to browse past issues of a magazine, you need to tap the logo at the top of the screen to be brought to that magazine’s homepage of sorts, where you’ll see a list of recent issues you can page through and download at the top.
Tapping into a magazine gets you a rudimentary table of contents that’s specially designed for Apple News Plus. Despite that custom treatment, it varies wildly from publication to publication, and even in its best, most detailed format, you’re getting only section headers and the occasional byline underneath. Some versions, as is the case with most of the available Condé magazines, feature just a list of print headlines, devoid of context.
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