In iOS 7, the final straw for Newsstand | Hacker News Reader

In iOS 7, the final straw for Newsstand

markokarppinen.com

128 pointsjamesmoss89 comments

> 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.

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

;)

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.

Hah! I'm imagining Jony trying to model the calendar app in styrofoam on his workbench.

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.

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.

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/

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.

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

Apple already has my information. If I subscribe to a print magazine, that makes one more company that knows my personal information and credit card information, and they are (unlike Apple) infamous for selling that information to marketing firms. If I subscribe to that same magazine via Newsstand, the publisher gets none of that information from Apple and my information is still as safe as if I hadn’t signed up for the magazine.

When you download ANY Newstand app, ANY Newstand app at all, you're running third party software that is making connections to third party servers.

Perhaps you believe that iOS is so locked down that the third party doesn't have your info to send to their own servers and monetize? But in the wake of oh-so-many "app uploads all of your info" situations, I find it surprising to believe this.

Yes, Apple isn't forwarding your payment information but that doesn't mean that nothing at all goes to the publisher. They're going to get info on you, both through Apple and through their app on your device. They thrive on getting that info, and more than one is likely going to monetize that info as best they can.

It comes with the territory but please do not think that because Apple handles billing, magically all of your data is safe.

Uh the subscriber details is what they want and what they don't get. They aren't going to be able to monetize my IP address or whatever else technical data they get from the app.

So basically Apple handles all the billing, and my data is safe.

That's precisely the reason that the Financial Times cancelled their iOS app and went with a pure HTML edition a while back - they wanted the subscriber information and Apple refused to give it to them.

one more company that knows my personal information and credit card information, and they are (unlike Apple) infamous for selling that information to marketing firms

Indeed. Heck, for many periodicals that's how they can afford to stay in business in the first place, their content is so thin.

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.

As a consumer, you shouldn't care about whether they use Newsstand, you should care about whether they provide the functionality you want. All of the functionality you want can be provided without Newsstand, so why do you insist on Newsstand?

Finding magazines works a lot better and more pleasant in Newsstand than it does in the regular App Store. All the magazines have cover art that changes with every issue, instead of an icon depicting some meaningless logo. And as a bonus, you can check out all the magazines for free.

I wish the rest of the App Store would be like Newsstand.

That makes sense, then. I was simply going off the list in your original comment, where none of what you listed required Newsstand.

True, and that’s why I followed up.

>>As a consumer, you shouldn't care about whether they use Newsstand, you should care about whether they provide the functionality you want.

Or perhaps you shouldn't tell him what he should care about and what he shouldn't. Just a thought.

I'm going based off of his own list. Sheesh.

Nah, that’s fine. I used my own experiences to show how consumers in general might actually prefer Newsstand magazines over magazines placed elsewhere in the App Store. Of course that opens up a discussion and that was the point. If I didn’t want input, I should’ve just kept it to myself.

Can apps not have regular payment subscriptions as well? I don't see how Newsstand is necessary for anything you want.

> 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).

It's all about shelf space. Walk down a grocery aisle and you see Oreos, Chips Ahoy, Wheat Thins, etc. If you are a new maker of sweet / salty snacks, what would you prefer: your product appear in equal placement with the others (i.e. on a shelf for all to see), or hidden in a cabinet with a generic "food" label on it?

An iPad (or iWhatever) owner's screen is the same as the aisle. Of course, they can put items into folders, but its their own choice, and even then the folders give a representation of what's inside. Plus, if they choose to folder-ize, having done so deliberately they'll more likely remember where to find their favorite periodicals (and that they're there in the first place).

Placing a digital magazine in the Newsstand Store is like placing it in the magazine section of a supermarket. Placing a digital magazine in another category in the App Store is like leaving a jar of peanut butter in the detergents aisle of a supermarket.

However, once the digital magazine is sold, either through the Newsstand Store or the App Store, the shopping experience is forgotten. The item is paid for and placed in one of the customer’s kitchen cabinets. Magazines sold through Newsstand are placed in a logical place, magazines sold through another category of the App Store are not, it is up to the user to place it somewhere they can find it. I like my peanut butter to be automatically placed next to the honey and jelly, I have no need to put it in another cabinet next to the oregano and peppermill.

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.

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?

>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.

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.

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.

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 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!

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.

Big media companies forced into a folder that hides their app from users aren't very keen on Newsstand either.

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.

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

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.

You can put it in a folder now, thank God

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

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.

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).

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.

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

A quick skimming of the reviews of NYTimes 4 Kindle show mostly positive associations with the Kindle-specific features.

There are kindle specific features?

I think most people like the fact that even the Sunday edition is only $1 (that's why I buy it). It's very bare bones. Pretty much just text and sometimes a single image. Charts or images with text are usually unreadable.

> 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.

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.

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

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.)

Yeah, my post was sarcastic, but it may have been a bit too dry to appear as such. Over a succession of releases, their iPad app went from not-too-bad, to buggy, to forehead-slappingly awful in iOS 7, at which point I cancelled my subscription.

Woosh. Yeah, missed it entirely. I think their website is great, so there's really no need for a tablet app. I think they should cut their losses on it. Focus on the site itself, and the iPhone/Android apps.

And The Daily Granite too!

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.

"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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

This really doesn't address your larger concerns, but have you tried Plex or Subsonic for streaming media? They're quite popular.

First up, thanks for the response!

So for myself only, and that is all my post will explain, I've ripped every cd i ever had (never had vinyl so not an issue) into ALAC and FLAC files (did both cause why not).

Then I just let itunes deal with keeping them up to date. I also generally purchase music from itunes or amazon and just dump it into itunes in general for syncing. Itunes radio is also passable for discovering new songs so streaming works ok.

For video, to be honest I have 2 that I have on my phone right now. One is the original star trek remake movie as I wanted to see what an itunes movie was like. The rest are just a bunch of ripped via handbrake dvd files on my nas server.

As to vlc being a pita to setup for streaming, my annoyance with it is in regards to setting up ftp, or http to get it to stream video files that I honestly can't be bothered to convert just so that I can play them on my iphone. I managed to get things working but the amount of effort was quite ludicrous to the point that i'd rather just use ffmpeg and convert the file manually then dump it into itunes to sync it. VLC on ios is not very useful.

My main issue with vlc is that it can't mount the existing afp (or nfs for that matter) share that my fileserver has for all my video files. And setting up transcoding to mp4 just made me realize that there are better uses of my time than dealing with such piddly issues. I'd rather be learning rust for example than dealing with streaming/transcoding issues to my phone.

I'll look at the three apps you mentioned, but overall the music app in particular works for my use cases. The video app is also, ok enough for me not to hate it. But I generally just download some videos and then dump them onto my phone for playback when in a line and then immediately delete them. I'm a pretty basic user in that regard.

> And setting up transcoding to mp4 just made me realize that there are better uses of my time than dealing with such piddly issues. I'd rather be learning rust for example than dealing with streaming/transcoding issues to my phone.

AFAIK that's not an issue? I have VLC on two iOS devices and you open the app, turn on the internal server, go to your web browser and drag/drop files in to it. VLC on iOS plays every format the desktop application plays.

My goal was to setup streaming so I could stream to my ipad or iphone when on my network. Having to drag/drop each file hits the same barrier as "I can just write a shell/ruby/perl/python script to run this through ffmpeg and add it to itunes and kick of a sync instead".

But that means applescript which also means I probably won't bother dealing with it. :)

What I was trying to setup was convert a video to mp4 transcoding and the live streaming server stuff that chunks the file for "streaming" aka, 10 sec section here/there.

My ipad only has 16g so streaming was my primary goal.

I forgot to mention a point that's probably significant. I cannot use iTunes. The OS's I've used do not support it. (I do have a Mac desktop but I never used it for connecting to the internet and never ran iTunes on it.)

My exploration of iTunes alternatives started back when it first appeared with the iPod. I used some Windows and UNIX programs that could work with the iTunes database for a while but of course Apple kept changing the database format; and the idea of "renting" music started to catch on with the unwashed masses: iTunes became accepted as a way to manage one's music collection. I just gave up on the idea of iTunes syncing.

I simply do not need it. I forget it even exists. I use HTTP and FTP to access my collection and it works well enough.

If I had been using iTunes all these years, and was satisfied with how it works, I doubt I would switch away. I know most people must fall into that category. I have just forgotten how I have avoided iTunes all these years. I have never used it, even once!

As for VLC, I agree with your approach. I too tried to get VLC working; and I think it's great they are trying to get it to run on iOS, but it's just easier to use ffmpeg. VLC uses the ffmpeg libraries, but not vice versa. Go figure.

I've never really understood the appeal of "streaming" (progressive download seems a better solution if one lacks the storage space) and I'm more an MPlayer guy than a VLC guy anyway.

The Documents app has both SFTP and FTP clients so you should be able to access and sync with your fileserver if you run the sftp subsystem or an ftpd on it. It has WebDav too. You can use a web browser to transfer upload/download files if all else fails.

Good luck with Rust.

Ah, yeah not being able to use itunes would explain things better. Also I should also note that I only really run osx, so itunes for myself is mostly a "does what it says on the tin" situation. I know windows users have other experiences. As for renting of stuff, honestly with my appletv renting movies is really my favorite way to enjoy movies. I rarely ever watch a movie twice so it works nicely. I don't think you can rent music though, least i've never seen any music under the rental situation.

As for the streaming I was trying to setup the "live http streaming" stuff that apple sometimes uses for keynote streams. Basically a m3u playlist that updates with a bunch of chunked mp4 files. But after an hour of no real progress I decided to abandon the idea.

If the documents app can use sftp thats way better. I have a huge aversion towards ftp in general and would rather not have it running on my fileserver. Webdav would be useful as well.

As for rust, its really cool and I'm tempted to go whole hog on using it instead of go for some of my rewrites. The trait system is really fun and honestly the whole community is refreshingly fun. Which could just be related to its size and newness but either way its a fun design.

I use the word "rent" in a general sense; I could have just as well used the word "licence".

I'm used to the old days when you bought music and it did not come with terms attached. But times are changing as more people forget about the rights they used to have, not to mention future generations who may never know what it is like to "buy" music with no strings attached. See http://www.apple.com/legal/internet-services/itunes/uk/terms...

Note the headings like USAGE TERMS and words like "nontransferable"; this is not your usual "purchase". Imagine seeing those terms on the packaging of a CD.

The reason you see these terms is that you are not "buying" music - you are licensing, or "renting" it. When you "buy" something, normally the seller does tell you how you may or may not use it and require you to enter into a private agreement governing the usage of what you just bought (regardless of the legality of such usage). "Licensing" or "renting" is a different matter, however - you must agree to terms.

A few years ago a story made headlines where a certain celebrity in the US wanted to tranfser his enormous iTunes music collection to his kids, but his lawyers advised him he might not be able to do that given Apple's license terms. He responded by announcing to a journalist that he was considering suing Apple.

As a consumer, I'm not a fan of the idea of restricting content to a particular device or set of devices. I prefer my files (including music files) to be portable. I have choice and I'm not married to Apple by any means.

> 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.

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

Let me know when the Tablet Age is able to do 3D modelling on the go like my Bronze Age stuff.

But we're not in the Tablet Age; much like with metals, we're in a time in which no computing platform is dominant. This is in contrast with the PC era, when every other consumer computing platform was pretty much a toy.

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.

> 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?

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

That makes a ton of sense. I would love for the Google Translate app to be listed under both "reference" and "travel".

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.

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.

There’s an app for that™

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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