In iOS 7, the final straw for Newsstand

http://markokarppinen.com/post/64104789298/in-ios-7-the-final-straw-for-newsstand

by jamesmoss • 13 years ago

128 89 13 years ago

devx• 13 years ago

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.

iambateman4• 13 years ago

Wait, so what you're saying is that expertise at industrial design != expertise at software design???

;)

raganwald• 13 years ago

You're joking, but if we take the statement seriously... Perhaps the mechanism works like this: The further we move away from skeuomorphism, the less correlation we'll see between industrial design talent and UX design talent.

scott_s4• 13 years ago

I just checked the dates on Wikipedia: Forestall left Apple in October 2012, and Newsstand appeared in October 2011. I think the idea behind Newsstand itself is terrible, and no amount of design of the icon matters.

nwh• 13 years ago

It's awful, there's no getting around it. The newsstand icon just seems to be the way it is because the designer ran out of ideas. I can't wait for a jailbreak so I can remove some of the most awful animations.

AshFurrow• 13 years ago

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.

markonen• 13 years ago

Free trials are a must, but you may find that other mechanisms convert better than the Apple-provided one. For example, I would consider offering a free issue on first launch without making the user sign in with their Apple ID and confirming a recurring subscription.

Recurring subscription revenue is possible outside the Newsstand section, too; that was one of the points I was trying to make.

iambateman4• 13 years ago

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.

csmattryder• 13 years ago

I used to jailbreak my iOS devices just to remove it, now redundant in iOS 7 (thankfully).

It makes no real sense why Apple would segregate these apps, yet also allow a directory hierarchy for you to organize non-NS apps.

If Newsstand solves a genuine real-world problem, why do I not have Gamestand? I have a folder for all my games, surely a Newsstand-like UI would be a pivot on the original idea?

If it isn't scrapped in iOS 8, I don't know what's going on. The idea around the newspapers live-updating/downloading/streaming is great, carry it on without shoving it away on the back page!

iambateman4• 13 years ago

Yeah, I can't help but wonder if it was built to appease (or appeal to) big media companies.

The idea of "a good old newsstand full of newspapers" is something only journalists still hold.

AlisdairSH2• 13 years ago

I tried it and have several newstand magazines. But, my biggest gripe is the inconsistency. Some magazines and newspapers have apps, others are in the newstand. If all news and magazine type apps were in the newstand, I'd be fine using it.

AlisdairSH2• 13 years ago

And I'd add that all the non-newstand apps are grouped in their own folder anyway.

thirdsun• 13 years ago

Well, I'd like to - but the New Yorker app is so bad, I canceled my subscription and just read the occasional New Yorker longform article in Instapaper.

Of course this is not Apple's fault, but rather Conde Nast's. Background downloading never worked for me and after some googling I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one with that problem.

Manual downloads of the current issue also don't work - that is unless you stay within the app and do nothing else: read another issue while waiting? Sorry, your download is canceled. Not paused but back at the very beginning. Use another app in the meantime? Of course not! Leaving your iPad untouched and just make a coffee or something during download? Well, as soon as your iPad goes to sleep/standby the download will stop.

Of course I have to admit that I'm on a slow connection (1 megabit/s), which is a problem for several 100 MB of size per issue, but this brings me to the last flaw, which is the filesize itself. Just think about this - you're actually downloading a collection of very large PDFs. The New Yorker isn't very heavy on media and rather text-based - and while there are certain sections that come as true, lighweight and selectable text, there's no reason to ship the majority of every issue as giant images of text. It's absolutely ridiculous and unfortunately a lot of magazines are using the same Adobe digital publishing suite that results in these oversized downloads.

You could actually see the difference in size when the retina iPad was introduced.

DannoHung• 13 years ago

You can put it in a folder now, thank God

__chrismc• 13 years ago

I use Newsstand for one magazine[0], purely because the digital version of the magazine is so well done I subscribed on the spot after reading the first digital issue, and renewed again last month. It's not just as good as the paper copy, it's (IMHO) better.

Every other iPad magazine I've tried? Not worth the bother, but that's the publisher's fault, not Apple's. I buy some one-off issues because I'd rather not have a paper copy taking up space, but that's it. I dislike having to have an app in Newsstand just for each these, so that's something Apple could maybe improve.

[0]https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/white-dwarf/id539505817?mt=8

jreed91• 13 years ago

I think newsstand works quite well on the iPad. But on the iPhone it makes no sense.

scott_s4• 13 years ago

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.

k-mcgrady• 13 years ago

That's the only one in mine too. The problem with Newsstand isn't the folder. It's that there are no good publications for it. Publishers just export their PDF into the app. If they designed an experience like the NYT or The Magazine I'd be using Newsstand a lot more. I wouldn't mind Apple forcing them to do it either (i.e. new 'guideline' preventing apps which only sell PDF's).

Tloewald• 13 years ago

Actually, just exporting a PDF would be a huge improvement on most of the periodicals I've tried. Instead they do stuff like exporting enormous bitmaps of text pages, making for bigger downloads, uglier text, and inability to search.

eli2• 13 years ago

If you think Newsstand is bad, you should definitely avoid the Kindle version.

mimiflynn• 13 years ago

It's that there are no good publications for it. Publishers just export their PDF into the app.

I don't find this to be the case. National Geographic includes video, and Wired includes interesting intactive content. The New Yorker even includes a section where you can read all the cartoons ;) Hardly just a PDF export.

lena• 13 years ago

I read Scientific American Mind and I actually wish it were a PDF. Instead, it's an app, with content that I can hide and show and some additional features like the odd video. It's pretty, but it's a shame that it is completely tied to my iPad and the articles aren't shareable with anyone, or saveable.

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

Yeah, the NY Times should really think about coming out with a tablet app. I'd subscribe.

scott_s4• 13 years ago

They have an app for iPad, but I don't find it necessary. I like browsing the standard website on my iPad. On my phone, however, the app is better than the website - easier to navigate and read. (If I am zoomed to the point that I can see the entire width of the front page, I can't read it very well.)

malkia• 13 years ago

And The Daily Granite too!

technosmurf• 13 years ago

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-...

smackfu2• 13 years ago

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.

untog3• 13 years ago

Yeah, that was the one benefit of Newsstand - and it didn't work properly for rolling news organisations.

Samuel_Michon10• 13 years ago

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.

[1] http://the-magazine.org/

mikeash4• 13 years ago

None of that requires Newsstand. The article isn't discussing "reading magazines on your iPad" but rather "creating apps that fit into Apple's 'Newsstand' category" which is nearly a completely different thing. The whole point of this article is that you don't need to use Newsstand to get the things you describe, and in fact you're better off not doing so.

criley22• 13 years ago

Also I find it funny that they think their personal information isn't being collected and potentially sold.

Samuel_Michon10• 13 years ago

The article is very developer centric. I shared what I’m looking for as a consumer. As a consumer, I don’t really care whether developing for Newsstand is inconvenient for some small shops. I have quit paying for digital magazines that didn’t switch to Newsstand.

I do have to say that people like indies like Glenn Fleischman and Dave Eggers use Newsstand brilliantly, so it’s by no means only an option for the likes of Condé Nast.

Samuel_Michon10• 13 years ago

The whole point of this article is that you don't need to use Newsstand to get the things you describe, and in fact you're better off not doing so.

I don’t think the article does a good job at explaining why developers would be better off not using Newsstand.

The only thing I saw mentioned as a disadvantage of Newsstand is that magazine titles aren’t placed on the main level but in a separate folder labeled ‘Newsstand’. That supposedly makes the magazines hard to find. However, many comments in this thread are about how prominent Newsstand is placed and how it is hard to ignore (ie. it can’t be removed, and until recently it couldn’t be stowed in a junk folder).

pagliara2• 13 years ago

I like Newsstand a lot too. Another really great example is Sound on Sound magazine (http://www.soundonsound.com/). It really captures what an iOS-magazine experience should look and feel like (dynamic content, interactive diagrams/pictures, easy navigation, etc).

I guess it would work just as well as a stand-alone app, but there's something nice about all my magazine content being located in a single location.

jkestner• 13 years ago

I'm with you, and I think it's pretty clear which creators Newsstand is for, from who's building effective experiences and who isn't.

Old media complained about losing access to readers and hasn't invested in this new medium beyond an Adobe export tool. Native digital publishers with low overhead are happy about the new distribution channel and a way to assign value to their content by periodicalizing it, and embrace new digital tools with their constraints.

After presiding over the app revolution, who do you think Apple designed Newsstand for?

smackfu2• 13 years ago

And on top of that, iPad issues are much cheaper than physical copies.

I haven't really noticed that. Most of the Conde Naste magazines will run you $4.99 an issue. A subscription is much cheaper, but it's much cheaper in physical copies too.

r00fus• 13 years ago

Like others mention, this doesn't require Newsstand - A good example of a great magazine is TRVL - it's free and looks beautiful on my iPad… and it's just an app.

I don't think people really value their privacy, or the no-hassle nature of newsstand would appeal to a lot more folks. Instead, we have a culture where either your information is already out there, and you get spammed/junkmailed/coldcalled a lot, or it's not, and you can't exactly trace how someone got it.

drp4929• 13 years ago

People do care about privacy if they are given fair choice.

When choices are between

1) FREE (in small print, give up privacy) vs 2) Pay $X (and protect privacy)

FREE overwhelmingly influences the choice.

However, if you find a market where all competitor directly charge comparable prices to consumers for the product and choices are

A) Pay $x and enjoy the product vs B) Pay $x, give up privacy and enjoy the product as well ads

then it'd be interesting if option B) would gain significant traction.

gwu784• 13 years ago

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.

pagliara2• 13 years ago

"Most people I know use other, free apps to transfer files to/from the device and to listen/watch audio/video."

Perhaps, but I'm willing to bet Apple funnels a significant amount of music sales by having an easy, visible route to purchase legal music. It's not like anyone is forced to use the iTunes Music Store, but can you really expect them not to promote it in their OS?

mynameisvlad• 13 years ago

Um, what?

Opening them up, I'm greeted with my collection of music, and my collection of videos (respectively). I see a store icon in the corner of the screen.

Just because Apple has decided to allow users to purchase music on the devices and has tied it into the apps themselves does not mean that the apps are not, at their core, file storage apps.

btian• 13 years ago

Are you seriously comparing Music and video apps to crapware during the PC era? and you claimed to have lived in that era?

They are more like Windows Media Player. Not particularly powerful, but used by many people, and many customers find them useful.

mitchty4• 13 years ago

So do what I do, move them into a junk folder.

The Music and Videos apps however, are actually useful unlike Newsstand. And these tactics by Apple are nothing like the OEM crapware from the late 90's, I grew up in that era, there is no real comparison here to be honest. They are perfectly serviceable music/video players. If most people use "other, free apps" what pray tell are these apps called so the rest of us could gain from this heretofore hidden knowledge. What benefit do I get from them?

I can already tell you using vlc is... not fun on ios when you get to wanting to stream video or audio. Simpler just to use the music app.

gwu784• 13 years ago

In your case (if I'm guessing correctly), it's probably better to keep using the provided Music and Video apps. This is because (if I'm guessing correctly), you get your music from something resembling the iTunes store or a subscription. If that's not the case, read on.

My case, and that of others I know, is where one has music that was purchased in the heydays of vinyl and later CD's, long before the "iTunes Store" was even a glimmer in Jobs' beady eye. And that music has been converted to digtital if necessary and is stored as files on HDD's or external media. How do you play these files on the iPhone/iPad? Can you do it with the Music app?

Moreover, how do you play video files that you have had since before iOS existed, or that you acquire outside of the iTunes store?

The solutions I refer to are not "hidden knowledge" as you suggest. But they assume familiarity with basic networking and networking protocols.

First, you will need to connect another computer not running iOS to your local network (e.g., plug it into you home router). Being HN, it is assumed you know how to configure and run "servers" (programs that serve files to a network) and that you use an OS that lets you do so, easily. Several such OS's are freely available.

Then, if you simply "serve" the audio and video files from the non-iOS HDD or external media drive to the iOS device via your local network, you can use a free app from the "App Store" (or you can just use Safari) that can behave as a client on the iOS device. Using the right apps, you can either 1. download files to the iPhone/iPad then play them, or 2. play them directly from the non-iOS HDD/media drive ("streaming"?).

I have used HTTP, FTP, SFTP, WebDav clients successfully. But there are probably others that could work.

Some apps also give you server capabilities, so you can download files from the iPhone/iPad to your non-iOS computers.

Any serious work with audio or video (e.g. transcoding) can be done on the non-iOS computer _before_ serving it to the iOS devices. For example, do conversion to MP4 (the format Safari likes) on the non-iOS computer.

Here's a few apps you might use (assuming you understand the protocols above):

AirDrive Documents OPlayerLite

If you have some specific issues you cannot solve, I'd be happy to try to help you. But you'll need to give details of what you're trying to do. If you just say "VLC on iOS is a PITA", then I'm afraid there's not much I can do except to say "I agree." Whereas if you say, "How do I ________?", then maybe I can suggest a possible solution.

Regarding these apps, you asked "What benefit do I get from them?"

It depends.

If you "rent" your audio and video from Apple, then they offer little to no benefit.

But if you _own_ audio and video files, e.g., from the pre-iOS era, and you want to play them on iOS devices, then the answer is "They let you transfer and play files." Quite useful, indeed.

pjmlp2• 13 years ago

For those who lived through the PC era...

Oh wait! what?!

So the PC era is gone and no one told me about it?

Typing this on a laptop and I just helped my dad to get a new desktop last week.

icebraining2• 13 years ago

Well, we still have bronze, but we're not in the Bronze Age anymore.

surfearth• 13 years ago

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.

Pxtl• 13 years ago

See, this is why every other OS lets users create shortcuts beyond the One Icon To Rule Them All for a given app. In Android there's that drawer full of widgets you can stick on the home screen, in WinPhone many apps let you "pin to the home screen" on various icons within the app, and obviously desktop OSes have supported that feature since time immemorial.

iOS stands alone with its demand that the home screen must be a canonical list of the installed programs and nothing else.

Samuel_Michon10• 13 years ago

There’s an app for that™

Launch Center Pro: http://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

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.

travem• 13 years ago

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.

How would this differ from the ability to create folders for apps today?

ChuckMcM2• 13 years ago

An app could have multiple tags but it cannot (to my knowledge) be in multiple folders.

CamperBob23• 13 years ago

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.

thehme• 13 years ago

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.

Samuel_Michon10• 13 years ago

When Newsstand was introduced, there weren’t many quality magazines that had Newsstand versions of their apps. That is to be expected and nowadays, all of the magazines I want to read are available in Newsstand. Those magazines are also available outside Newsstand though and that may be the case for the magazines you read as well. If you’re interested, you can look for the titles in the Newsstand Store.

If I needed to get to the Newstand app, I would have to scroll a couple screens from the front to finally find it.

Wouldn’t that be because you moved it there? Newsstand is on the first page of my Springboard and it has always been there. iOS 7 didn’t change that.

qwerty_asdf• 13 years ago

Why not both?

releod• 13 years ago

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.

ashray5• 13 years ago

I fail to understand why the new opaque icon makes it "much worse" compared to the icon in previous iOS versions.

In iOS 7, the final straw for Newsstand

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