Friday 4 October 2013

When free does not actually mean free? - Apple Newsstand

This is not an Apple hate or love piece, I love my iPad and my Nexus 7 with equal measure and I think they both bring great joy to my life and I also spend real (paper) money on the odd (paper) magazine namely Ride Magazine and Fast Bikes Mag (gotta plug the pulp every now and again).

So I have been doing a lot of research recently for my full time gig on what the best pricing structures are on the Apple newsstand and I have noticed a curious issue that is annoying a lot of users in relation to NewsStand.

It appears that a lot of users are becoming enraged at theprospect of downloading a free app container app only to realise that they then have to pay to get access to the actual content.

Here is a sample of the complaints below which were taken from a great article about this phenomenon here on slackstory.


I don't think this this is a great conspiracy but if the Tin says free then it should be free.


For example on the newsstand today the image below shows 4 free magazines but only one of them is actually Free.

Surely the answer is simple keep the Free stuff and the paid stuff separate, you will then have a lot less complaints from your users and more people will trust and use the Apple Newsstand...Which I still think is an amazing product.

Come on Apple, you know it makes sense.




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