My nomination for the most underwhelming feature in iOS 5 goes to Newsstand. Touted by Apple as a one-stop shop for getting newspaper and magazine subscriptions in iOS, it has a lackluster selection, and its organization approach is baffling a lot of people.
Newsstand is a homescreen folder much like any other folder you can create in iOS. However, it’s got some magical properties; you can’t add apps to it, nor can you delete it. It’s the bucket where Apple slots periodicals apps that live in the Newsstand section of the App Store. You’re not browsing a separate store when you’re in Newsstand. For proof, click on one of the bottom buttons and you can navigate to other parts of the App Store.
If you ask me, Newsstand is pointless and irrelevant. It would have been better for Apple to take a cue from Amazon and made Newsstand a ‘shopping section’ in iBooks, which would add value to that app. Having the newspaper and magazine subscriptions handled through iBooks would get added eyeballs into the app, which has always felt like the black sheep of iOS store followings to me; it would also help iBooks stake its claim as the ‘reading hub’ of the iPhone or iPad, versus the Kindle or Nook apps.
However, as my colleague Michael Grothaus points out, magazine publishers definitely want a say over how their products look and act on the iPad. They’d lose most of that control if they went with an EPUB format for Newsstand items (iBooks’ native format), and if you had magazine applications mixed into iBooks alongside true ebooks in EPUB and PDF format it could be somewhat confusing for users. (“Why did that ebook launch a separate app? What happened to my library shelves?!?”)
Your mileage with Newsstand may vary. The offerings are slim at this point, with the most interesting one to me being the New York Times. There’s Good Housekeeping, the New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar UK and a few smaller magazines. E-publishing integrator PixelMags tells us that there’s a slew of titles on the way from its clients, including Crain Communications’ AutoWeek, Dennis Publishing’s UK titles (PC Pro, iGizmo, The Week), 29 titles from Imagine Media, Factory Media’s extreme sports magazines, and Grind Media’s Bike and Powder.
Once there’s a better offering of newspapers and magazines, I might use it more. But for now, it’s being moved to the last page of apps I have on the iPhone and I’ll save space on the front for something else. Oh, yes, there’s the other annoyance; you can’t legitimately move Newsstand into an app folder, since it already is a folder! Dave Caolo let us know about a trick for that; make a folder with two normal apps, then just as the folder is animating together drag the Newsstand icon into it. This is actually a bug, and may make it impossible for you to open Newsstand later on.
iOS 5 features: Newsstand originally appeared on TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog on Thu, 13 Oct 2011 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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