Can Puzzles Fix Apple's Failing News+ App?

NYT readers aren't the only ones who love coming back every day to play Wordle. Apple is also following along closely.

Apple is slowly filling its News+ app with word and puzzle games, presumably in an effort to make it more popular. First, it was Crosswords, and next up is Quartiles in iOS 17.5. The News+ app is a kind of lame duck, although at least it's one that Apple keeps plugging away at, like when it added more sports content late in 2023. The latest attempt at attracting users and keeping them there is puzzle games.

"As a behavior analyst, I understand the power of reinforcement and user motivation," Devora Fromowitz, VP of operations at Achievements ABA Therapy, told Lifewire via email.

"Games like Wordle tap into our desire for a daily challenge and mental stimulation. This, combined with the convenience of accessing it within the existing News+ app, could create a 'sticky' feature that keeps users coming back."

Puzzle

Apple launched News+ back in 2019 as a digital newsstand for magazine and newspaper publishers to sell on Apple platforms. The problems were, as ever with recent Apple services ventures, greed, confusion, and a lack of regard for the user. There is a free version and a paid version ($9.99 a month), where you can access several subscriptions and other options to pay for extra subscriptions from within the app.

Apple originally tried to squeeze a 50 percent cut from publishers before dropping it to a still-ambitious 30 percent, and the result was that few publications have really flourished there.

Combine this with a poor user experience, where articles are presented inconsistently (sometimes you see them in the native Apple News format, sometimes you see a browser view), and readers are often better off, UI-wise, just reading articles in the browser to begin with. It's a recipe for stagnation.

Since then, News+ has limped along. In 2021, it initiated the News Partner Program, which tried to convince more publications to join by reducing Apple's cut of their profits to 15 percent. Then, in iOS 17 last year, Apple added crossword puzzles, but only to paid subscribers.

Desperation

As we've seen with the success of Wordle, the continued popularity of crosswords, and the fact that whenever you look at the phone of somebody over 40 on public transport, they're playing solitaire, people love puzzles. I play the Guardian crossword every day, and I was hopelessly addicted to the NYT's Digits puzzle until it canned it after a trial period.

"Puzzles have brought a fresh group of readers to news entities just like they did when introduced in newspapers over 100 years ago," competitive puzzle player and crossword writer Missy Walker told Lifewire via email. "Apps, websites, and online entities need consistency to survive, and with puzzles, players will show up regularly."

Like the current crossword puzzle, the Quartiles word game will be for News+ subscribers only. It can be bought separately or as part of the Apple One bundle, which also includes TV+, Fitness+, extra iCloud storage, Apple Arcade, and Apple Music.

That's fine, but mightn't it be a better idea to offer some games on the free tier of the News app, or at least offer one daily game, with the option to play more if subscribing? After all, if you want to catch new subscribers to an otherwise lackluster service, the old "the first one is free" model seems to fit. And once you catch somebody with a puzzle they connect with, they will probably stick around. After all, you can read the news anywhere, but you can only get Wordle at the NYT.

"Simple, casual word puzzles seem to really tap into our innate human desire for intellectual challenge and accomplishment hits in bite-sized form. It could be a smart strategy from a business perspective to keep users subscribing and returning regularly," Rychel Johnson, M.S., LCPC, mental health therapist, licensed clinical professional counselor, and senior contributing editor for OurPublicRecords, told Lifewire via email.

Can puzzle games save Apple's News+? Probably not. But if nothing else, it shows that Apple hasn't completely given up on it yet, like it did with, say, the MacBook Pro's Touch Bar.