Apple News May Finally Expand Beyond the English-Speaking World
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While most of Apple’s services reach over 100 countries and regions, Apple News has always been considerably more limited. After launching exclusively in the United States in 2015 as part of iOS 9, it quickly expanded to Australia and the UK a month later in iOS 9.1. It would remain limited to those three countries for another four years before finally launching in Canada with iOS 12.2 in early 2019.
The Canadian rollout was likely held up by the need for Apple to provide a bilingual service. Canada has two official languages, and just over 20 percent of the population speaks French as their mother tongue. French is also the official language of Quebec. An Apple News rollout that didn’t include content from French-Canadian news services like La Presse, the Journal de Montreal, and CBC Radio-Canada would have been a non-starter and may have even run afoul of Canadian laws.
However, nearly six years and as many major iOS releases later, Apple News remains available in only those four countries. Apple has expanded curated local news coverage in the US and Canada, providing topics of interest for sports, dining, entertainment, and local politics in various cities and regions, but it has yet to move outside the borders of the English-speaking world — with the obvious exception of Quebec.
That may soon change, though. According to a new report by Daniel Thomas in the Financial Times, Apple is “considering adding new countries to the platform” while also building out its locally focused news coverage in the UK and may soon add the puzzles section there. As of now, both local coverage and puzzles like Crosswords, Quadriles, and the new Sudoku in iOS 18.2 are limited to the US and Canada.
Thomas cites “people familiar with the plans,” although he doesn’t provide any information on what new countries could be in the mix. While Apple’s 2019 foray into Quebec means it’s no stranger to foreign-language news, any Parisian will tell you that Francophone Canadians represent a fundamentally different language and culture from France.
Nevertheless, if Apple expands its news service, key European markets such as France and Germany will likely be among the first on deck. Apple News presently reaches about 125 million readers monthly in the US, Canada, the UK, and Australia, and its curated news service has effectively become a significant influence on what tens of millions of people read every day. After all, Apple News is preinstalled on every iPhone out of the box and does a great job of aggregating news from multiple services all in one place.
While subscribers to specific publications are still likely to go to their own news providers’ apps, Apple’s paid tier, Apple News+, adds access to recent content from major publications such as The Wall Street Journal and The Toronto Star, while other sources such as The Washington Post and Bloomberg let folks access their own paid subscriptions through Apple News — even for those who don’t subscribe to News+. A few big publications, most notably The New York Times, have eschewed Apple News entirely, forcing readers to rely on their individual apps instead, but those are the exceptions rather than the rule.
From a brand awareness point of view it’s really important. We need to be there. It’s the front door to everyone’s iPhone.
David Higgerson, chief digital publisher at Reach, the UK’s largest regional newspaper owner, speaking to Financial Times
According to Thomas, one of the largest publications in the UK, the Mirror, counts close to a quarter of its overall readership — about 4.5 million monthly readers — as coming directly from Apple News. That number has only been increasing as Meta and Google downplay their news coverage and change their algorithms.
A paid Apple News+ subscription also includes access to a couple hundred magazines, and publishers have been surprised at how much of their business is now coming from that direction. Immediate Media CEO Sean Cornwell told the Financial Times that its BBC History magazine “hit seven figures” in regular readership, thanks to Apple News+.
Apple News has sort of come out of nowhere, and very quickly has become quite a material revenue line. The really attractive thing about Apple News is you’re taking content that you’ve already got and with very minor tweaks just send it to Apple to syndicate and they pay on a share of engaged minutes.
Sean Cornwell, CEO, Immediate Media
Although Apple News+ had a rocky start when it first launched in 2019, it’s slowly and steadily won the race. Despite heated debates among publishers about ceding control to Apple over bringing customers in through their own platforms, most have embraced it as an easier way to reach a larger global audience. The free Apple News service is freely available on every iPhone, providing aggregated access to non-paywalled news sources and driving revenue for publishers through advertising. A $9.99 monthly Apple News+ subscription opens up subscription access to several newspapers along with magazine subscriptions.
The downside for the news industry is not only the fear of diluting their own brands by having them aggregated under Apple’s banner but also losing the demographics and targeted advertising that’s available through their own first-party apps. Apple News naturally operates under Apple’s staunch privacy policies, which means publishers and advertisers don’t get any details about who you are when you’re reading their news.
Nevertheless, most publishers are willing to accept this for the expanded audience. Research from Apple and other marketing analysts has shown that Apple News reaches not only a larger audience but also a different one from those who typically visit individual news sites or download their apps directly.
Apple also continues to emphasize human curation of its news service, with an editorial team that chooses which stories get promoted while also delivering editorial spotlights and roundups of interesting topics. There are presently about 100 editors working in New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, and California. Lead editors head up the teams in each country, ultimately reporting to Apple News Editor-in-Chief Lauren Kern, a former high-ranking editor from New York Magazine.
Expanding Apple News+ to other countries isn’t just a matter of building partnerships with publishers and overcoming language barriers. Apple will also need to assemble editorial teams in each region where it plans to launch the service to ensure a hands-on team is on deck to curate the news and provide the same quality experience.
