The iPhone-maker Apple is not known to focus on aggregation services. But still, it operates Apple News, a news aggregator app only for iOS, watchOS, and macOS.
With Apple News, users can read news articles, based on publishers, websites and topics of their choice. The app works by pulling in articles from the web through various feeds or from news publishing partners through the JSON descriptive Apple News Format.
Any news publisher can submit their content for inclusion in Apple News.
After a year acquiring the Texture all-you-can-read magazine service and integrating most of the company’s employees into the Apple News team, Apple revealed Apple News+, the company's own news subscription service.
With the introduction of Apple News+, the company redesigned the Apple News icon using a white background with a more prominent letter 'N'.
News+ has categories like Travel, Lifestyle, News, and Sports. Articles on News+ can include individual publications with "live covers", which features a looping video clip, and article formatting that’s specific to the iPhone.
Because News+ is offered within the existing News app, its interface is also directly integrated into News.
According to CEO Tim Cook, Apple News is already the number one news app for Apple users, with over 5 billion articles being read every single day.
And with News+ subscription service, Cook said that it will provide users the access to 300 news publications, that include both magazines and newspapers, as well as all-digital publications.
Apple said that News+ uses on-device AI to make determinations on articles to recommend to users, and does not allow advertisers to track users.
"What you read about on Apple News will not follow you across the web," said Roger Rosner, the company’s VP of applications, emphasizing that the app was designed "with privacy from the ground up" .
Apple News+ is just another effort by Apple to redefine journalism for the post-print era.
In 2010, the company pitched the original iPad as a potential savior for the declining readers of newspapers and magazines. It then launched a publication aggregation folder called Newsstand in October 2011, and later acquired Prss, a digital magazine creation platform in 2014.
The next year in 2015, Apple began shipping every iPhone with a preloaded, free News app, which features content from magazines and other outlets. The app surfaces articles that are based on the user’s interest, as well as a trending stories section and a featured section curated by Apple’s editors.
With Apple News having a substantial amount of users, Apple is ready for the next step by launching News+.
And as for the subscription fee, Apple News+ cost $9.99 per month and includes unlimited access to all of the service’s publishers, with Family Sharing - but only through apps on the company’s products: iPhone, iPad, and Mac devices.
Apple is offering the first month free of charge, and it’s initially available only to users in the U.S. and Canada.
News+ is also Apple's efforts to boost its service offerings, part of which is because of the slowed iPhone sales in China.
By offering premium contents, the company hopes to make its devices more enticing, as well as gain additional revenue from distributing contents to the millions of iPhone, iPad, and Mac users around the world.
However, there are complaints from publishers, saying that they generated limited revenues and have little to no loyalty to their brands, despite Apple giving publications the ability to keep 100 percent of ad revenues from self-sold ads, and in some cases, even paying for early access to third-party publishers.
Controversially, this is because Apple is reported to be taking 50 percent of the subscription fees for itself, to then distribute what's left to publishers, based on the attention their individual articles receive.