efore the internet arrived to the masses in the mid-
1990s, your monthly magazine delivery was a coveted
package of goodies containing the best and most reliable
information on a variety of topics. And then the internet,
the great disruptor, was open for business. Almost overnight,
the value of traditional print magazines became obsolete as
printed content became instantly outdated and competing
ways to spend leisure time were a free click away.
Nearly 25 years have passed since the internet reduced the
once mighty magazine industry to a tiny specialty section in
convenience stores. Traditional publications have tried to meet
the new market realities by offering digital PDF downloads of
their monthly magazines, usually at the same cost as a normal
print subscription. I have tried a few of these over the years,
but eventually allowed my subscriptions to lapse due to the
horrible user experience of constantly pinching and zooming,
which was only made worse on a small phone display. The oth-
er reason I stopped supporting these publishers was because
even though the content was well written, professionally edit-
ed, and included eye-catching page layouts, nearly everything
I was reading I’d already seen dozens of times on a variety
of websites and RSS feeds by the time it was printed. So it
was quite a surprise to me that Apple decided to attempt a
Netfl ix-style business model for the magazine and newsprint
industry by creating Apple News Plus, a $9.99/month sub-
scription service featuring instant access to content from over
250 publications (Apple promises to get to 300 soon) via the
Apple News app on iOS and macOS. To prime the subscriber
pump, Apple is offering a 30-day free trial that you can sign up
for by selecting Try It Free under the News+ tab of the Apple
News app. Considering I once collectively paid far more than
ten dollars a month for only a handful of the hundreds of titles
offered in the News Plus catalog, I found the value proposition
attractive enough for me to sign up for a trial. I also hoped
Apple could be the one to fi x the reading experience of digital
magazines.
Upon launching the Apple News app on my iPhone and
selecting the News Plus icon at the bottom of the screen, I
tapped Try It Free and the App Store automatically created
a subscription of $9.99 to be charged to my account every
month. After that, I was free to peruse and access all of the
publications currently available. Apple suggested Newsweek,
Time, and People, but I chose the latest issue of Rolling Stone
to be my inaugural experience. Tapping the cloud download
icon near the bottom right of the magazine cover’s thumbnail
allowed me to read the issue cover to cover offl ine. The April2019 issue featured a Live cover of Game of Thrones actress-
es Masie Williams and Sophie Turner. Whenever I tilted the
iPhone, their images shifted slightly, creating a pseudo-3D
effect. However, tapping the cover failed to take me any-
where. I would have preferred to have turned to page 2. I
quickly discovered that with magazines designed for News
Plus, there is no concept of pages. Consequently, there are
no tracking bars to show how much of the publication you’ve
read, meaning you have to keep track of what you read with-
out any visual cues. There isn’t even a bookmark function to
mark a section for future reference. The only thing you can
do is share a link to an article. Needless to say, I was not im-
pressed with the bare bones reading experience.
After closing Rolling Stone and having no indication of
which articles I’d partially or completely read, the next publica-
tion I tried was a more niche title called Retro Gamer. Guess
what? Unlike Rolling Stone’s Live cover and web article layout
style, Retro Gamer was just a PDF. I cringed. Perhaps the
talented engineers at Apple fi gured out a way to minimize
the dreaded pinch and zoom cycle that made other magazine
reader apps such a pain to use? With mounting trepidation,
I opened the PDF and was dismayed to discover that the
double tapping feature to focus on a column or layout portion
isn’t very smart. Rather, it zooms in on the screen portion you
tapped on rather than trying to frame as much of the article at
a zoom ratio adequate to read the text without too much eye
strain. When you tap Next from this zoomed-in view, you sim-
ply advance to the magazine’s next zoomed-out page rather
than to an intelligently repositioned screen that would allow
for continuously reading the article. And just like with Rolling
Stone, News Plus failed to provide any bookmarking or read-
ing progression tools for this PDF-delivered magazine.
Discoverability is also a big problem. While there might be
a search function on the iPhone version, it must be hidden
somewhere since I couldn’t fi nd it. I had to instead rely on the
alphabetical list of magazines and Apple’s attempt to clump
related magazines into categories to attempt to fi nd another
article or publication to view. Speaking of articles, the service
also lacks any related articles at the conclusion of premium
articles. Even fi nding magazines to read could have been im-
proved by perhaps presenting them in a newsstand format.
For a company that redefi ned skeuomorphic design with dig-
ital representations of analog equivalents, Apple could have
done the same with its newsstand. The least Apple could
have done with its categories is present the participating
publications in an attractive newsstand layout that would haveAPPLE NEWS PLUS REVIEW
APPLE’S NETFLIX-STYLE MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTION SERVICE FAILS TO DELIVER VALUE
BY MIKE RILEY
B
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