Apple Announces News App to Rival Flipboard

Susan Prescott, vice president of product marketing for Apple Inc., speaks during the Apple World Wide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Monday, June 8, 2015. Apple Inc. kicked off its annual developers conference in San Francisco, where the company will unveil a revamped streaming-music service, improvements to its mobile software and tools to speed up smartwatch applications. (PHOTO CREDIT: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg)

Apple announced a new news app at its developers conference Monday, giving it a direct competitor to Flipboard and other popular news apps.

Called Apple News, the app will create personal feeds based on users’ reading habits, Susan Prescott, who runs the News division, said at the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference here.

The app “combines the visually rich layout of a magazine with the immediacy and customization of digital media,” the company said in a release.

It will be available in the fall and will track more than 1 million topics, Prescott said.

Early partners will include Condé Nast, which publishes Wired magazine, ESPN, Hearst, Time, CNN, Bloomberg and The New York Times, said Apple’s senior vice president for software engineering, Craig Federighi.

Apple also promised that users’ privacy will not be compromised, even as the app customizes itself over time by following each user’s interests and reading patterns.

“The more you read, the more personalized the News app becomes, refining the selection of stories delivered to your iPhone or iPad,” Apple said.

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SOURCE: USA Today, Elizabeth Weise