As a user, I like Newsstand a lot. No longer is my personal information being sold by publishers to marketing firms. No longer do I need to trust publishers to be careful with my credit card information. Payments happen automatically, as part of my regular iTunes bills. New issues are downloaded automatically, so I always have something to read when I’m traveling. And on top of that, iPad issues are much cheaper than physical copies.
I do think that publishers need to step up and make better apps, but that’s not a Newsstand issue. They should learn from The Magazine[1], which uses the medium perfectly: issues load in seconds, articles aren’t too long and are accompanied by great retina photos, and the cover icons are legible, even on iPhone.
Have you ever met someone who actually used Newsstand? Every conversation I've ever had about it was: "I can't believe I can't put this in a folder."
I tried to use it once and was so underwhelmed I think it lasted 2 minutes.
It totally makes sense to push people away from the service...it's not ever going to get widespread adoption without some major changes.
I hate Newsstand. Mine has one app in it: The NY Times. I use it frequently - any time I'm eating a diner breakfast, or taking the train into the city on the weekend. I don't want Newsstand, I just want the NY Times app in an easy place to get to.
In 2012, it seemed that Newsstand was a lucrative option for some publishers. Future PLC (which makes PC Gamer, Computer Arts and Computer Music magazines) earned $8 million USD in one year. They were really happy with the number of people who signed up for marketing messages (5 million out of 12 million downloads), which was an early stumbling block for publishers because Apple doesn't share the customer contact info by default (traditional publishers always had access to this).
Have other publishers seen a serious drop in users or revenue since then for the article to recommend not putting magazines inside Newsstand anymore?
http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/27/future-has-made-5-million-...
I'd like to see Music and Videos go the same way. These apps are useless. Opening them up, one is greeted with "Store". But I don't want to purchase anything, I just want a place to store my files. And I know for fact I am not the only one.
Most people I know use other, free apps to transfer files to/from the device and to listen/watch audio/video.
For those who lived through the PC era, these tactics by Apple are perhaps reminiscent of Microsoft/OEM "crapware" that came installed on every PC (and no doubt still does). Even though the PC was "new", it was unclean. The first thing one had to do after purchase was to remove all the crapware.
In its ongoing homage to human intelligence, Apple has made sure one cannot remove these garbage items without having to jailbreak. Brilliant.
I've got several 'magazines' in my newsstand app, Science News, Wall Street Journal, NY Times, Scientific American, Economist, "Distro"[1], and Smithsonian. For the last few days the WSJ has vanished and the tech support guys aren't sure what is up with that.
So I use the Newstand every day. And in so doing it suffers from none of the issues that the OP discusses.
That said, I've got all of my non-serious apps (games and puzzles), all shoved to a single 'page' at end of my scrolling set of apps. My travel apps collected on page 2, the 'built in' apps on page 1. But the manual arrangement is not has handy as newstand. Unfortunately there isn't a user controlled nesting strategy.
Perhaps the home screen should be tags (user created) rather than App icons. Selecting a tag moving into a group of icons that have that tag. It would probably work well for me if it existed.
For me, Newsstand is annoying because it takes extra clicks to get in and out of apps, the latter of which is more frustrating. iOS7 made this frustration worse because now you need to explicitly click the home button twice to exit (once for the app and then again for Newsstand) whereas with <iOS7 you could click the home button once to exit the app and then tap on the lower half of the screen OR click the home button to exit Newsstand. I know this sounds picky, but in practice it has been an annoyance.
That being said it does seem to be working betteron iOS7 and the NYTimes, WSJ and New Yorker apps all have fresh content ready when I open them.
Interesting post. I just launched a Newsstand app (http://35mm.io) specifically so that I could leverage the "free trial" period for subscription IAPs and recurring revenue. Even given the list of reasons cited in the article, I'd still choose that path.
It'd be interesting to see this from an individual/small team's perspective vs. that of a publisher.
I will say that iOS 7 does seem to have made the NYTimes Newstand app actually work properly. Like it says there is new content, and I open it, and the new content is actually there already. Which is the whole premise of Newstand. On iOS 6, it would display an update spinner every time.
Edit: From reading the article, it seems like this is probably because NYTimes is updated more than once per day, but Newsstand only allows one update per day. So the Newsstand update mechanism was never very useful for this case.
This article is all wrong. I am a consumer, and the publisher should be interested in what works for me. While one can argue the merits of Newsstand, I've used it, and I've used standalone native apps as the OP suggest. I prefer consolidation to mess. I prefer a consistent experience across all reading material, much like the physical counterpart found in the magazine / newspaper format.
I think newsstand works quite well on the iPad. But on the iPhone it makes no sense.
As a news reader, I agree with this article. I think when I first got my iPhone years ago and the Newstand app was part of it, I might have clicked on it to see what it was, but that was it. Since then, I have downloaded stand alone apps to access the reading material I am interested in. If I needed to get to the Newstand app, I would have to scroll a couple screens from the front to finally find it. In fact, I recall that after upgrading to iOS7, my apps were not ordered, but what was definitely in the last screen was this opaque little icon with a small little plane and other text on it - newsstand. I don't think I have clicked on it yet, but if I was an avid user, I'd be upset it got kicked to the back.
I fail to understand why the new opaque icon makes it "much worse" compared to the icon in previous iOS versions.
Why not both?
Unfortunately, this use of covers is purely skeuomorphic in nature...
That's what kills me about iOS7 -- they declared a jihad against bitmaps that left the Newsstand as a series of flat-shaded rectangles containing, wait for it, bitmapped magazine covers. So we get a texture-mapped image of a newspaper's front page, floating in an ugly partitioned gray space.
It never occurred to any of these rocket artists that skeuomorphism can refer to more than just nonfunctional textures, but shapes as well.
It's as if Jobs really was the only one at Apple with any aesthetic sensibilities. The trolls were right all along.
> The folder-like design in iOS 5 and iOS 6 has been replaced with an opaque app icon. The end result is so horrible that it’s hard to avoid thinking it was done maliciously: if someone was tasked with hiding away a set of unwanted apps, they would be likely to come back with a design that was something very much like the iOS 7 Newsstand.
I doubt it was done maliciously, but I stand by my previous belief: Jon Ive is just really, really bad at overseeing software design. He's much worse at software design than Scott Forestall.
Maybe Scott's UI wasn't "up to date", but he seemed to be great at UX design. Jon Ive doesn't seem to understand UX at all (did you see the font he chose for iOS7 at WWDC, which fortunately got changed because of backlash? You could barely see it), and he just copied some UI designs from 3rd party apps or other mobile operating systems (webOS, Android, WP8, etc), and made the colors lighter - all of it implemented in a not very cohesive way. And let's not even bring up the animations, translucency or parallax effect anymore, which again are things only a UI/UX newbie would add.