Apple News has competition and it’s called Readly

A cross platform friend for magazine and news readers

Apple News is a good service for media junkies, but in some ways I think Readly has the advantage. So, what is Readly, what does it offer, and why should you consider taking out a subscription?

What is Readly and what does it offer?

The European leader in digital newspapers and magazines, Readly is an iOS, Android or Amazon app providing easy access to 6,300 UK and international titles, including national and regional newspapers and magazines. You can access Readly via a browser, so it works everywhere.

If you look at the service, you’ll find the newspapers include many that are not made available in Apple News: The Guardian, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, METRO, Independent and more.

Readly offers a rich selection of podcasts, lets you download 500 titles to read offline, can bookmark articles and recipes, and search through the catalog. The search facility is useful, as it also lets you search historical catalogs. That alone makes the service useful for any genealogist or researcher. (Best used alongside the British Newspaper Archives).

If you take out a subscription you can share it with up to five people. Readly costs £9.99 in the UK, but local pricing and availability differs.

Who is Readly for?

Readly is different to Apple News. While the latter service is very much based on making digital content available, Readly exists to give you the experience of newspapers and magazines in a digital form. The content isn’t repurposed for its own user interface, instead it presents the titles it provides in the way they were originally designed. This makes for a more unique experience, with some additions to make it feel much closer to the sense of reading the original title.

The service also provides access to titles you may not find in Apple News, and it is also cross-platform, which means you can access it from whatever device you use and share it with up to five others in a device agnostic sense.

As I mentioned, the search facility is quite powerful as it lets you search back through several years of content. So Readly is a research tool that is a cross-platform Apple News replacement that also offers some titles you won’t get there.

What is Readly like to use?

Available via the browser and through an app, I’ve focused on the app for this review, though everything you find in the app is also accessible via the browser.

The app offers up five primary pages –

Discover:

Recommended content based on what you’ve looked at before.

Magazines:

A complete list of all the titles, navigable by numerous categories, nations in which the title is published, languages, new arrivals and as an A-Z listing. I really enjoyed exploring the different design languages between nations, too.

Search:

You can search titles, content, explore categories or look for specific words. You can also filter results by language.

Newspapers:

You’ll find local and national papers. You’l find global newspapers. You can also explore these by country as well. Oddly enough, there was a big difference between the front covers of Irish and UK newspapers when Queen Elizabeth II passed away.

My Content:

You’ll find your Favorite titles here. You can also explore your recently read titles and any pages you’ve previously bookmarked. You’ll also find a segment called “Hidden Titles”, a feature that lets you hide titles you don’t ever want to see again.

Tap the top left of the screen to access your user profiles, to create and share Readly with others, account information, Settings and buttons to get you help if you become stuck.

Titles are presented as clear icons displaying the relevant cover image. That’s neat as it means you get to stick with what the publisher intended you to see.  Tap on a cover image to open the virtual magazine, each page faithfully reproduced as it was published.

You can search through specific titles, scroll swiftly through a magazine to reach a specific page, share pages with other people who do not need to be subscribers to look, and bookmark pages.

Readly does also support its own reading mode, one tap of the button lets you move into a highly legible reading view. While that view does sacrifice the original page design, it’s a good compromise that makes magazines easy to read on a mobile device.

Readly provides what you need in an easy to navigate, highly visual metaphor that I think is great in use. I like Readly a lot, and think it’s most certainly worth using if you want digital convenience and access but still crave the feeling of exploring newspapers or magazines as they were designed.

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