How to use Apple News – and what extra does Apple News+ give you?

Finding your way around

Apple News is ridiculously simple to navigate around. Along the bottom in the iOS app you’ll see five menu items: Today, News+, Audio, Following and a Search icon.

Of these, Search will be your initial best friends, essentially continuing the work you started during set-up. Explore serves up suggested channels and topics based on the preferences you’ve already expressed. Search strips things back and lets you, um, search for specifics. There’s nothing cryptic going on here.

Subscribe to channels and topics

Like the look of any channels and topics you come across on your travels and you can add them to your favourites by clicking the ‘+’ button in the top-right corner of each icon. Navigate to the Favourites tab and you’ll see all your selections laid out in a simple list.

Also in this list is Saved stories and Saved recipes – yep, these are any individual articles you’ve bookmarked; you can also access your Apple News browsing history from Following too. Once on a story you can save it for later reading (by hitting the bookmark icon in the top-right), share it, or as we mentioned before, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ it. The share icon lets you send stories to others via all the usual channels available on your iPhone, iPad and Mac.

Get to know Today

But it’s the Today tab that forms the heart of Apple News. Here you’ll see a feed of articles from the channels and topics you’ve suggested, together with others Apple News editors thinks you’ll like.

There are sections as follows: Top Stories (handpicked key stories from the day), Must reads (again handpicked), For You (just like on Apple Music, For You recommends stories based on what you read and liked), Trending Stories and then a section on Food.

You can also browse through key general interest topics from the Today screen, not just topics you have subscribed to.

When you do give it a try, make sure you follow Stuff’s channel. Oh, did I already mention that? Sorry. When you get there, click the + icon in the top right corner.