8 ms·

In iOS 7, the final straw for Newsstand

128 points by jamesmoss 13y ago

devx 13y 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.
- iambateman 13y ago
  Wait, so what you're saying is that expertise at industrial design != expertise at software design??? ;)
  - raganwald 13y 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.
    - iambateman 13y ago
      Hah! I'm imagining Jony trying to model the calendar app in styrofoam on his workbench.
- scott_s 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago
Interesting post. I just launched a Newsstand app (http://35mm.io 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 13y 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.
iambateman 13y 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 13y 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!
  - iambateman 13y 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.
    - untog 13y ago
      Big media companies forced into a folder that hides their app from users aren't very keen on Newsstand either.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- AlisdairSH 13y 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.
jreed91 13y ago
I think newsstand works quite well on the iPad. But on the iPhone it makes no sense.
scott_s 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
  - eli 13y ago
    If you think Newsstand is bad, you should definitely avoid the Kindle version.
    - AsymetricCom 13y ago
      A quick skimming of the reviews of NYTimes 4 Kindle show mostly positive associations with the Kindle-specific features.
      - eli 13y ago
        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.
technosmurf 13y 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-from-ipad-magazines-in-a-year/ http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/27/future-has-made-5-million-...
smackfu 13y 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.
- untog 13y ago
  Yeah, that was the one benefit of Newsstand - and it didn't work properly for rolling news organisations.
Samuel_Michon 13y 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/ http://the-magazine.org/
- mikeash 13y 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.
  - criley2 13y ago
    Also I find it funny that they think their personal information isn't being collected and potentially sold.
    - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
      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.
      - 13y ago
gwu78 13y 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.
- pagliara 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
- mitchty 13y 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.
surfearth 13y 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 13y 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_Michon 13y ago
    There’s an app for that™ Launch Center Pro: http://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/ http://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/
ChuckMcM 13y 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 13y 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?
  - ChuckMcM 13y ago
    An app could have multiple tags but it cannot (to my knowledge) be in multiple folders.
    - bashinator 13y ago
      That makes a ton of sense. I would love for the Google Translate app to be listed under both "reference" and "travel".
CamperBob2 13y 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 13y 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_Michon 13y 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 13y ago
Why not both?
releod 13y 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 13y ago
I fail to understand why the new opaque icon makes it "much worse" compared to the icon in previous iOS versions.

128 points by jamesmoss 13y ago

devx 13y 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.

iambateman 13y ago
Wait, so what you're saying is that expertise at industrial design != expertise at software design??? ;)
- raganwald 13y 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.
  - iambateman 13y ago
    Hah! I'm imagining Jony trying to model the calendar app in styrofoam on his workbench.
scott_s 13y 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 13y 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 13y ago

Interesting post. I just launched a Newsstand app (http://35mm.io 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 13y 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.

iambateman 13y 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 13y 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!
- iambateman 13y 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.
  - untog 13y ago
    Big media companies forced into a folder that hides their app from users aren't very keen on Newsstand either.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
AlisdairSH 13y 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.

jreed91 13y ago

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

scott_s 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
- eli 13y ago
  If you think Newsstand is bad, you should definitely avoid the Kindle version.
  - AsymetricCom 13y ago
    A quick skimming of the reviews of NYTimes 4 Kindle show mostly positive associations with the Kindle-specific features.
    - eli 13y ago
      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.

technosmurf 13y 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-from-ipad-magazines-in-a-year/ http://paidcontent.org/2012/09/27/future-has-made-5-million-...

smackfu 13y 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.

untog 13y ago
Yeah, that was the one benefit of Newsstand - and it didn't work properly for rolling news organisations.

Samuel_Michon 13y 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/ http://the-magazine.org/

mikeash 13y 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.
- criley2 13y ago
  Also I find it funny that they think their personal information isn't being collected and potentially sold.
  - Samuel_Michon 13y ago
    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.
    - 13y ago

gwu78 13y 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.

pagliara 13y 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 13y 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 13y 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.
mitchty 13y 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.

surfearth 13y 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 13y 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_Michon 13y ago
  There’s an app for that™ Launch Center Pro: http://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/ http://contrast.co/launch-center-pro/

ChuckMcM 13y 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 13y 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?
- ChuckMcM 13y ago
  An app could have multiple tags but it cannot (to my knowledge) be in multiple folders.
  - bashinator 13y ago
    That makes a ton of sense. I would love for the Google Translate app to be listed under both "reference" and "travel".

CamperBob2 13y 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 13y 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_Michon 13y 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 13y ago

Why not both?

releod 13y 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 13y ago

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