What’s the Apple News feature newly introduced in iOS 9?

If you were someone not using Newsstand on your iOS based device, you are not alone. And that is the reason why Apple has thought of something new, and announced it today at the WWDC 2015 keynote. Calling it as Apple News, Apple just introduced this news aggregator service today.

The rumors have come true, Apple announced today that they’re killing of the Newsstand, as the company has introduced the News app in iOS 9. It brings the content from across the globe; owners can customize the way articles are being displayed. It is basically a Flipboard app, as you get personalized feed of content and articles.

There are quite a number of navigation animations that have been included in the news app. The experience has been kept optimized for iPhone as well as iPad when viewing the full screen and photos, or videos are directly playable in articles.

Availability

Rolling out in the US, UK, and Australia too, the Apple News does retain the publication’s branding, and it looks nice enough. You can call it a slightly remixed of the Facebook News Feed, which is wild.

The challenge with these apps is that they give you an endless torrent of stuff to read, and it all winds up feeling like an undifferentiated sludge of content. There are powerful machines learning algorithms that figure out which stories belong in which articles.

Features

The app will get smarter as you read it. News is smart, so the more you read, the better it gets at showing you the stories you may be interested in. Though, we have used many news apps over the time, and with the experience we say that it is almost never true. It feels same when you used it first time and

Talking about the data, the News keeps track of more than a million topics; choose from your interests like business, technology, fashion, sports and more. There’s an Explore tab, with suggested publications and topics that you can head over when you are free and get to know what’s happening around the world.

What’s there for a publisher?

It was for a fact that Newsstand was a huge disappointment for publishers. So, this question is natural, Are there any ads? Or any revenue split model? It’s not clear they’ll invest much in creating modified RSS feeds to power this app.

But Apple is trying to be generous here, as publishers can keep 100% of the revenue from ads they sell while 70% when an iAd sells ads for them. For those who don’t know, the iAd is company’s advertising platform. It offers campaign management, targeting, as well as reporting is made easy so that you focus on the business.

Apple VP Susan Prescott showcased the News app on stage, you can bookmark articles to read later, and according to her, it is the best mobile reading experience you’ll get on an iPhone. Well looks like she forgot that Flipboard has been doing most of this for quite a time now. And the funny thing is that it was first launched on iOS platform. Although, with this Apple News being built right into the iOS, it would be challenge to news reading apps out there in the market.

Along with this, Apple also introduced the new Apple Music service that costs $9.99 per month. You can update to iOS 9 beta 1 right away, using this guide of ours.