After reports emerged last month that Apple is struggling to find new subscribers for its Apple News Plus service, the company has just made another announcement that slightly reeks of desperation.
In order to get people to at least try Apple New Plus, the company has announced that new users who sign up now won’t have to pay for the first three months. This follows Apple giving a free 30-day trial when it originally launched the service.
If you own an iPhone, Mac or iPad, simply go to the Apple News app on your device and hit the Apple New Plus tab. You should then see the latest offer.
The bad news is that if you were one of the early adopters who signed up for the original 30-day free offer, you do not qualify for the new three-month free deal: you will have to fork out the full $9.99 every month. If you live in Canada, that increases to $12.99.
However, if you don’t qualify, there’s no reason to become despondent – not much has changed since the service was originally launched. Apple seems to have a harder time selling News Plus than any of its other subscription services.
Analysts are speculating that this could partially be because the company is not in a position to curate the content to the same extent that it does with Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade and Apple Music.
The integration with the standard Apple News is also not what it should be, with an often irritating mishmash of standard digital text and PDFs as one switches from one magazine to the next. There is also no reason to expect that things will improve.
Reports are now doing the rounds that Apple is considering bundling Apple News Plus with one or more of its other subscription services soon. The three-month special is only available until the end of Cyber Monday.