Last Monday, Apple unveiled the brand new Apple News+ magazine subscription service to the public. What the service does is that it essentially allows users to pay a small fee to get access to a plethora of different types of magazines.
When using Apple News+ on my iPad, I like how somewhat simple the interface is. Everything seemed to be in the right place. If I were to go to web stories from a source like CNET, the app would also show me the newest issues of CNET Magazine that I could read.
I also liked the fact that the service even has Macworld, which is a physical magazine that I was a subscriber of in high school and one of the years digitally (on the Kindle for iPad app) in college.
The only issue that I saw with the interface was that adding a magazine was not as easy as it could be. Right now, users must hit a download icon in order to get the magazine, but even that does not always work. Instead, I think that it needs to be similar to adding a song on Apple Music, where you simply tap the “+” icon to a song or album, and it is immediately added to your catalog.
Another thing that I do like about Apple News+ is that it is accessible on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. This makes it so that you can access it almost anywhere.
Additionally, it is nice that you can actually download the magazine to your device. I know that might sound stupid, given the fact that a service like this should always do that, but it would suck having to try to get your magazine on WiFi or cellular 24/7. I could not imagine reading a magazine from a blurry screen.
Lastly, the price point could not be better for this type of service. For only $9.99 a month, you get access to over 300 different magazines. In fact, I would go as far as to say that a service like this might have saved the magazine industry.
With us all living in a subscription-based society, this is literally the Netflix of magazines. No longer do you have to go to a Barnes and Noble, Walmart or Target to get your newest magazine. No longer do you have to travel anywhere to get a physical magazine. Apple News+ takes out the middleman and other annoyances and just lets you get it from their services, which can be accessed and read on a nice device like the iPad.
I’ll admit that Apple’s 50 percent cut of the money from the service is a little greedy and does not give the publishers enough of the money, Apple News+ is a good start in a direction that we should have possibly started when the iPad was first released in 2010.
Apple might have failed with their old newsstand app, but the Apple News+ service gets 3.5/4 stars from me. It should add an easier way to add and download magazines to devices and possibly get more magazines and publishers too.
Rating: 3.5/4 stars
