In March 2019, Apple announced a new service was coming to Apple News across all platforms- Mac, iPad, and iPhone. This service, Apple News+, provided subscribers access to a host of magazines and articles in premium newspapers. In an effort to expand the value of the service, in July 2020, the company launched Audio Stories. Audio Stories were narrated articles of select Apple News+ content that could be enjoyed on its own or listened to while also reading the article in the News app. This new feature had one big caveat though.

Audio Stories could only be enjoyed on iPhone. This was, and still is, a baffling design choice as in the lead up to Apple News+ being launched Apple ensured that the News app was available on the Mac and utilized the Project Catalyst technology that allowed them to easily port their iPad version of the app to the Mac to ensure feature parity. So there is truly no technological reason why Apple can’t bring Audio Stories to iPad or Mac. Adding to this confusion is that for quick reads of an article, I would be willing to bet many users read on their iPhone. But for longer form content like magazine articles, I’m sure many users prefer to use their Mac or iPad. The iPad especially makes a great demo device for reading and enjoying magazines and articles.

The expansion of Apple News to an audio format also should have prompted Apple to bring support for Audio Stories to more devices like Apple Watch and HomePod. Apple has focused a lot of Apple Watch marketing on its connection to audio by heavily promoting the combination of Apple Watch with Apple Music and AirPods. Apple News could have been the next pillar in that combination. Siri could also have also integrated with Apple News to allow users to ask Siri to play a story in their queue and seamlessly work with HomePod.

By having only some features of your subscription to Apple News+ available on some devices, some subscribers get less value for the same $10 per month price than others depending on what device they prefer to use. That’s just bad business and not fair to all paying subscribers. Imagine if you were subscribed to a video streaming service and only certain movies could be streamed on certain devices. In addition to making no sense, that kind of action would prompt cancellations and deter non subscribers from ever subscribing in the first place.

In 2018 and 2019, Apple seemed to be moving in a direction of unifying their products to all run the same apps so anyone on any device could subscribe to an apps service and Apple would then in turn be able to collect their 15-30% cut of that subscription revenue. But in the years since, Apple seems to have lost that direction and instead begun to hyper focus on making sure iPhone users get priority treatment in any service they introduce.

Apple Music is probably the most successful service Apple has introduced (it may be right behind iCloud+) but even Apple Music’s recently released Classical companion app is only available on iPhone. It is not on CarPlay, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or even Android. The impact on HomePod has been yet to be determined.

Apple needs to return to the direction they were headed in in 2018 and 2019 and ensure that subscribers to their service can enjoy all the features they pay for, no matter what device they prefer to use. This will increase the demand of their services, protect the value of those services, and increase sales of other product lines.