Apple adds News app with iOS 9

Since its inception critics have claimed the iPhone and iPad are only good for media consumption. That argument has been overcome and disproven in many ways over the years, and yet the iPhone and iPad are actually excellent devices for media consumption as well. With the new iOS 9 Apple has added a News app that gives you a simple, clear way to view the news and information you want—like TechSpective.

When you install iOS 9 a couple things will be immediately obvious the first time you log in. The Passbook app is now called Wallet and has a different icon. You will also notice that there’s an extra icon on your desktop—the new News app.

The News app is basically an Apple version of Flipboard. The app collects stories from the topics and sources you select and presents them in a clean, visually-appealing manner. Apple explains, “News brings the beautiful editorial layouts and typography of print to the screen. Enjoy interactive and engaging stories, rich with photo galleries, videos, and animation. Articles are optimized for both iPhone and iPad, so you’ll have a great reading experience no matter which device you’re using.”

When you open News for the first time it asks you to choose at least one news source to get started. Apple has gathered all of the major news and information sources like CNN, ESPN, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, etc., as well as popular topic categories like Politics, Fashion, and Technology. The sources you choose are added to your Favorites.

You can click Favorites at the bottom to view a tiled thumbnails of the sources you’ve chosen and pick a specific one to look at. Explore lets you peruse the wider range of news sources and categories available from News. The best way to experience News, though, is For You—the same name Apple uses for the Apple Music feature that curates music you might be interested in. In this case For You pulls stories from your Favorites and presents them in a feed format so you can scroll and browse and click the stories that interest you.

You can save articles to mark them for reading at a later point or even while offline. Articles that are saved are also synced through iCloud across all of your iOS devices so you can save a story in news on your iPad and read it later from your iPhone (or vice versa).

Search lets you find specific topics or source—for example, TechSpective. This site is one of the available sources on Apple News. It’s just not one of the featured sources like New York Time and CNN. Go to Search in the News app and search for TechSpective and add it to your Favorites. Then all of the stories from TechSpective will show up in your For You feed and you can read them or put them in Saved to read later on.

Go on. Do it now.