Apple News is an app that will appear on your Home Screen when iOS9 arrives in September. This app will aggregate news from a number of selected providers and present it to you. If you’re a publisher you will need to embrace the feed format required by Apple News. If you want your content to stand out from a design perspective then you will have to think seriously about how you can cost effectively beautify every single article you would like to publish.
Apple might be hoping that you start to use this app rather than Facebook for your news update.
Unfortunately Apple has a bit of a chequered past when it comes to understanding the consumption of news content. Have you ever wondered why the App Store has two News categories, News & News Stand?
The Apple News stand approach may have unfairly obtained a reputation as the place where apps go to die. Fortunately the Times iPad app avoided this fateful conclusion and has become the highest grossing app in the UK store (if you exclude Games).
With iOS9 the Newsstand will be removed, maybe too many apps really did suffer from being in the Newsstand.
So with iOS9 you will now have two different competing options, the Apple News app and going into the App Store to get a super slick app from your preferred vendor.
On the face of it Apple News should dominate and become the single source of news for Apple consumers. Alas there may be a couple of wrinkles. Not all of your favourite news sources will be available within Apple News. There may also be some Apple Editors or recommendation engine that decides what news you should see. In fact this is starting to sound a lot like the Google Newsstand. Anyone remember when that was launched? Do you know anyone that uses it?
So maybe it’s not as clear cut as Apple would like.
What are you more likely to use every day; an app that chooses your news or an app that seamlessly feeds you news whilst your checking on updates from friends ?
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