Apple News+

About Apple News+

Apple News+ is the paid tier of Apple News, the reader that ships on every iPhone, iPad and Mac. The free app gathers headlines from hundreds of publishers and then stops at their paywalls. The subscription opens those paywalls for the titles Apple has signed, and adds material that has no free counterpart: complete magazine issues you can download and read offline, daily crosswords, narrated audio versions of long articles, and a recipe section called News+ Food. Apple describes the catalogue on its US page as more than 500 magazines, newspapers and digital publishers, naming The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Houston Chronicle and the San Francisco Chronicle; the UK page puts the figure at more than 400 and names The Times and The Sunday Times. One fee covers the lot, it can be shared with a family group, and it is the news component of the Apple One Premier bundle.

What does Apple News+ add to the free Apple News app?

The free app is a personalised feed with human editing on top. It is useful on its own, and most people who own an iPhone already have it. The subscription changes three things.

Articles from participating publishers open in full rather than stopping at a prompt to subscribe. Magazines arrive as complete issues that can be downloaded to a device and read without a connection, which makes the paid tier closer to a digital newsstand than a news feed. And a set of features exists only for subscribers: original mini and full size crosswords, published daily and graded from easy to hard; professionally narrated readings of long articles, also carried on the Apple News+ Narrated podcast; and News+ Food, announced in February 2025 and shipped with iOS 18.4, which adds a searchable recipe catalogue, a full screen cook mode and offline saving, with recipes from publishers including Allrecipes, Food and Wine, and Serious Eats.

The app looks the same either way. Nothing in the interface tells you at a glance which stories your money is buying, which is part of why the service can feel like a set of features switched on rather than a product in its own right.

How does the price compare with subscribing to the titles directly?

Apple lists 12.99 US dollars a month in the United States and 12.99 pounds a month in the United Kingdom, in both cases after a free trial, with three months included when you buy an eligible Apple device. The service is also part of Apple One Premier, which Apple prices at 39.95 US dollars a month and which bundles five other Apple services alongside it.

The arithmetic is not complicated. If you would otherwise pay for two or more titles in the catalogue, the bundle costs less than the parts and the magazine access is close to free on top. If you read one newspaper and nothing else, it almost certainly does not pay, and the publisher's own app will usually give you a better reading experience for the title you actually care about. Premier only makes sense if you already pay for several of the services inside it; if News+ is the one you want, the standalone subscription is the cheaper route.

What are the limits worth knowing before you subscribe?

The catalogue is a set of commercial deals, and deals end. CNN's feed disappeared from the platform in 2025 while terms were renegotiated, and some publishers hold their most valuable reporting back even while they take part. A title being listed today is not a promise it will be there next year, and the price does not fall when one leaves.

Advertising does not go away when you pay. Discovery is the other common complaint: with several hundred publications in one app, finding a specific magazine or following a running story takes more work than it should, and the personalisation improves only slowly as you like and follow topics. Reviewers who use the service daily tend to praise how much ground you can cover quickly and criticise how hard it is to steer.

Apple has not published subscriber figures since 2020, when it reported 125 million monthly active users across the free and paid tiers combined, so outside estimates are the only guide to how the paid tier is doing.

Which devices and countries does Apple News+ cover?

Apple lists iPhone, iPad, Mac, CarPlay, HomePod and Apple Watch, with support reaching back to iOS 12.2 and macOS Mojave 10.14.4, though individual features need newer releases: News+ Food, for instance, arrived with iOS 18.4 and iPadOS 18.4.

Availability is the harder limit. Apple News is sold in four countries, the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia, and the catalogue differs between them because the publisher deals are struck locally. The UK line-up leads with The Times and The Sunday Times where the US one leads with The Wall Street Journal. A reader outside those four countries gets nothing rather than a reduced version, so anyone weighing the service from elsewhere should treat it as unavailable.

Who should buy something else?

If you follow one paper closely and read it end to end, subscribe to that paper. You get its full archive, its own apps, its newsletters and its comment sections, none of which come through News+, and the money goes to the newsroom rather than through a middleman.

If what you want is a news feed rather than a magazine rack, the free Apple News app already does that, as do Google News and any competent RSS reader, and none of them cost anything. The paid tier earns its fee on magazines, crosswords, narrated audio and recipes, not on headlines.

If you need dependable access to a specific publication for work, check that it is in the catalogue today and accept that it may not be tomorrow. Research that depends on a title staying available is better served by a direct subscription or an institutional one.

And if you live outside the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia, or you read mainly on Android or Windows, the question does not arise. News+ is a service for Apple hardware and it stays inside it.