Apple released version five of its iOS operating system Wednesday afternoon, which includes the new Newsstand feature that helps users collect and organize apps for newspapers and magazines.
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- Newsstand collects (some of) your news apps in a virtual bookshelf.
So far, the Newsstand store is dominated by magazines, including major titles like Wired, National Geographic, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Car and Driver and Cosmopolitan. A few English-language newspapers, including The San Francisco Chronicle, The Oklahoman and The Guardian, have Newsstand apps available.
Newsstand pretty much functions as expected, though it seems a little confusing, at least in this early phase, to have two different places for news apps. The iTunes store still has the “news” category containing all news apps, only a few of which have also been set up as Newsstand apps. (For iPad, there are 4,331 news apps, only 136 of them currently work with Newsstand.)
That said, iOS 5 is only a few hours old. It will likely take weeks for most users to download it and for most news organizations to decide whether to update their apps to use the Newsstand.
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