Apple has unveiled an all-new News app that will be available with iOS 9 this fall for the iPhone and iPad. It combines the layout of a magazine with the immediacy and customization of digital media, according to Susan Prescott, Apple’s vice president of product marketing, who demoed the app at today’s Worldwide Developer Conference keynote.
News follows over a million topics and pulls relevant stories based on your specific interests that can be shared or saved for later — without compromising your privacy, she says. It’s powered by the new custom-designed Apple News Format.
News collects all the stories you want to read in one place, in a customized newsfeed called For You. Readers can see the publisher channels and topics they’re following in Favorites, and to discover new content, Explore makes suggestions based on what you’ve already read. The more you read, the more personalized the News app becomes, refining the selection of stories delivered to your iPhone or iPad.
Apple News Format allows publishers to create stories that look beautiful and take advantage of the full power of iOS, says Prescott. Content can include photos and galleries, audio, video, maps and rich interactions such as parallax and animation. When publishers create their stories for News, content comes alive with custom fonts and intuitive Multi-Touch gestures, she adds. Apple News Format automatically customizes the layout for each screen size, so News content looks great on both iPhone and iPad.
Publishers interested in signing up can visit www.icloud.com/newspublisher with additional publishing tools available later this year. iOS 9 will be available this fall as a free software update for iPhone 4s and later, the iPod touch 5th generation, iPad 2 and later, iPad mini and later.