Top 8 Free Best Magazine Apps for iPhone 2023
The best magazine apps these days come in lots of shapes and sizes, from those that offer you access to digital versions of your favorite publications to those that are more like personal magazine apps: Flipboard, for example, which pulls news items and web articles from different sources in order to produce some kind of personalized magazine layout that suits your reading habits.
We recently decided to got through a bunch of these different apps in order to find the best options available to current iPhone users. Of course, these picks are all subjective and entirely depend on your tastes as a reader and your reading habits.
If you’re the kind of person that spends half an hour scanning the latest trending topics each morning then a certain app might suit you: something like Pocket, for example, which is great at clipping articles from the web to be shared across different devices and read at a later date. Perhaps you prefer getting the latest issues of your favorite magazine delivered directly to your iPhone? In that case, something like Zinio would be a good option. We discuss both of these and more below.
Free iPhone Magazine Apps
8. Texture (Free)
I’ll mention Texture at the outset of this list because I’m still just discovering the app myself and beginning to learn its full potential. It is really a reimagined look at how we consume digital magazines on our mobile devices, and has to be tried to be believed! – Download from iTunes
7. Yahoo News Digest (Free)
Yahoo News Digest isn’t one that could be considered among the traditional magazine apps but it is an excellent source of the latest news, and also is one of the best looking apps – actually, the best looking app – in this particular area of the App Store. It pulls news from a variety of different sources and represents one of the most pleasurable reading experiences of any of the current stock of news and magazine apps. – Download from iTunes
6. Timeline (Free)
While many of these apps fall into the category of news apps rather than magazine apps, I like to think that the way these apps arrange the news almost qualifies them as the latter: especially when you consider the tile like layouts of something like Flipboard. Timeline is one of the better news apps out there at present when it comes to putting the news into context within the current flow of events.
Often, when using a personal magazine app like Flipboard for example, you will get the news fed into your feed but it has no context outside of the article itself and the category it is associated with. Timeline is an excellent way to uncover the true nature of many of the bigger news stories as they break, ensuring that you know more about these stories than just the basic details.
5. Longform (Free)
One of the joys of following your favorirte magazines used to be that you would be able to follow your favorite writers. Of course, Twitter these days puts you in direct connection with these writers as well as the publications they write for, which is something that Longform looks to take advantage of with their excellent iPhone app.
The Longform app has a unique focus however on (you guessed it) the longer articles from specific independent blogs and also major magazines.
So if you look at reading the latest articles as a task that takes a few hours rather than one that can be squeezed in beside your morning coffee, then Longform is one of the best magazines apps and certainly worth checking out for your iPhone. – Download from iTunes
4. Pocket (Free)
We mentioned Pocket above, and again, this is not a magazine app in the traditional sense but works with this very popular approach at the moment of allowing you to customize the content you receive and how you receive it. Personal magazine apps are those that allow you to pull content from the web and other sources and then arrange this in a way that suits you, and Pocket is very good at doing this. But then, this isn’t the real function of the app: no, as the name suggests, Pocket is all about saving content for later.
The developers behind this one have realized that most readers simply don’t have the time in this fast paces world to sit down and read full articles, even in the calm before a work day. It therefore allows you to pocket the things you are reading and then pull them up on whatever device you happen to be using when you next get a few minutes to browse the news stories that most interest you. As such, you get a series of clippings from the web that can be accessed whenever you like and from wherever, which is the definition of a personal magazine app, really.
3. News Republic (Free)
News Republic is another of these news apps that pulls articles from a range of trusted sources to give you a constant stream of useful and topical content. It’s also one of the more up to date and on the ball of the current news apps, giving you a fantastic level of detail and insight mere moments after a specific news story has broken.
Apps like Flipboard are great as personal magazine experiences, but the customization of your news feed and layout will often lead to you missing the latest stories as they break and instead picking them up later. This might not be a big deal for some, but if you like to stay on top of things then News Republic is worth checking out. There’s also a great new widget that was introduced for iOS 8 users that allows you to see everything quickly and without entering the app unless you want to read these articles when they appear.
2. Zinio (Free)
Zinio describes itself as the world’s magazine newsstand, and this is a description that fits the app down to the ground. This is one of the best magazine apps in the more traditional and literal sense of this title: that being, an app that offers digital editions of all your favorite publications, news sources, topics and much more.
There are new articles available for free every day, so you can even download Zinio and try it before investing in entire magazines to read. It’s one of the best apps to have however if you often find yourself in the positition where you have to plug some time. Simply flip open the app, grab a magazine and read away. – Download from iTunes
1. Flipboard (Free)
Finally we have Flipboard, which represents one of the very best magazine apps out there on the iPhone at present, at least when it comes to personalized magazine and content. It is great for those who like to seek out their news in specific areas, such as the tech world or perhaps even simply the latest stories trending in fashion, for example.
Flipboard mainly pulls its content from big publications such as the New York Times and People magazine, but uses a lot of smallers sites too, ensuring a rich level of variety in your daily content feed. – Download from iTunes
