Leaked Mac screenshots reveal details of Apple’s upcoming news subscription service

As Apple is prepping to launch subscriptions in the News app, one developer took and shared a few screenshots showing the upcoming subscription service in the News app for Mac.

The images were taken by developer Steve Troughton-Smith from yesterday’s fifth beta of macOS 10.14.4, revealing a few previously unknown tidbits about the service. For starters, publication subscriptions in the News app could feature their own sections or tabs such as Following, For You, History, Magazines, My Magazines, Saved and Subscription.

We also know that digital magazines will be divided into 15 categories: Automotive, Business & Finance, Crafts & Hobby, Entertainment, Fashion & Style, Food & Cooking, Health & Fitness, Home & Gardening, Kids & Parenting, Men’s lifestyle, News & Politics, Science & Technology, Sports & Recreation, Travel and Women’s Lifestyle.

You’ll be notified when new issues are available.

Next, macOS will notify subscribers when new digital issues of their favorite magazines are available. The same notification service was discovered earlier on iPhone and iPad by way of prior iOS 12.2 betas. It seems publication issues can be stored offline and most of the code is written in Apple’s modern Swift programming language, according to Troughton-Smith.

Texture, now owned by Apple, offered unlimited access to 200+ magazines for $10 per month.

Despite being called Apple News Magazines, the service will host digital newspapers, too. Texture, the digital magazine app Apple purchased in 2018 to serve as a basis for its new service, provided access to 200+ popular magazines in the form of scanned pages or PDF files.

It’s unclear if subscribed publications in the News app, traditionally PDF-based on iPad, would get reformatted for interactivity and the iOS form factor or if Apple News Magazines might arrive with PDFs only to add optimized formatting and interactivity down the road.

Another thing we don’t know yet is whether this’ll be an all-you-can-eat service.

You’ll soon be able to subscribe to digital magazines and newspapers via the News app.

For some context, the Texture app used to charge a flat monthly fee of ten bucks in exchange for unlimited access to digital magazines like People, The New Yorker, Time, National Geographic, Shape, Newsweek and more. Apple’s service may repackage and offer the same content as Texture, at the same or a slightly higher/lower price. Another possibility: Apple could let us pick and cherry-pick the magazines we want to subscribe to.

Apple today confirmed it will be holding a press event on March 25, with invite graphics suggesting a strong focus on an upcoming TV subscription service and, quite possibly, magazine subscription offerings in the News app. We also expect other announcements like next-generation AirPods along with an updated budget iPad and a fifth-generation iPad mini.

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