Apple will be launching a new subscription service in the United States and Canada whereby Apple lovers can now view their favourite magazines all in one application! Apple News+ adds magazines to the standard Apple News app. The key highlights made at the Keynote conference were organisation, design, and privacy.
All the big names such as The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Esquire, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Men’s Health, and Vogue, and over 300 more will now all be viewable in one iOS and Mac application with the latest device update.
How does Apple New Plus Magazine Subscription Service work?
In a very similar way as other medium subscription services like Netflix and Spotify. The big idea is allowing the user to combine content from multiple sources whilst charging only a single monthly fee.
So how much does the end user save?
Well if you wanted to subscribe to all the magazines separately it would cost over a whopping $8,000 per year! This is in stark contrast to Apple’s Premium News service where the user only pays $9.99 per month ($119.82) nearly saving the user approximately to the scale of 70 times less than what it would cost otherwise. Not only that, Family sharing of the Apple News Plus subscription will also be allowed at no extra charge. This will allow each family user to have their own individual favourites and customisations. All this for one monthly fee of $9.99 and you can start the first month for free. So why not give it a try!
What about our privacy!
Now this is all well and good, but won’t Apple use this to track your data like Google does? Apple have ensured that they will not know what you read in Apple News Plus, and most of all they will not allow advertisers to track you. This is because all user recommendations are done on the device, and no data is shared to Apple Servers.
So is this likely to become the next big thing?
Well today Apple News is already the world’s most popular news app, with more than 5 billion articles being read each month! This is looking like a big innovation turn around for Apple. Apple have sometimes been criticised lately for the lack of innovation since the prime days of Steve Jobs back in 2010. It seems Apple might be back on track to this vision when Roger Rosner (Vice President of Applications) said it is their aim to “make the best magazine-reading experience on a mobile device”.
So what do you get in the application?
At the Keynote March Conference Director of App Design Wyatt Mitchell demonstrated how the app can make recommendations to the user (using in-device intelligence). He also showcased stunning looking live covers (video covers), amazing infographics, direct access to articles via contents page, simple swiping to browse through each article. Not only that you can save all your favourite magazines in ‘my magazines’ whereby recent issues are automatically downloaded for offline use! Each magazine is allowed to showcase their own unique design. Articles are also tailored to Iphone and Ipad so they look perfect on both devices.
Apple News+ is now available in the US and Canada today, by updating to iOS 12.2
Australia and the UK will follow later this fall, with the rest of Europe to come later.
