Apple announced on Monday that it has acquired Texture, a service that provides access to digital magazine subscriptions.
If you haven't used it before, here's what it is and how it works.
This is the first screen you see when you load the app
Texture says it provides access to more than 200+ magazines.
You need to subscribe for access
It's $9.99 a month after a 7-day free trial, but you get unlimited access to all of the magazines the app offers, including popular ones like GQ, Men's Journal, Vanity Fair, Time, The New Yorker, Esquire, National Geographic and more.
Here's a look at what's available
There's plenty to choose from. You can scroll through the app and pick magazines sorted by alphabetical order.
I picked The Atlantic.
It shows me the current issues as well as past issues.
The magazine loads quickly and is ready to read in seconds.
You see the cover of a magazine once you click into it. You navigate through the pages by swiping across the screen. You can also pinch to zoom in on text. It's kind of hard to read this way, since the text on an iPhone is small and you need to pan around a page. It's probably much better on an iPad.
You can view the magazine's index by tapping the Index button at the top of the page.
You can save certain articles to read later, even if they're from different magazines.
You can save your favorite magazines so they're always easy to find in one spot.
There's also a highlights section that shows new and noteworthy stories that Texture thinks you might be interested in.
Why did Apple buy Texture?
I think I have an idea. Apple's News application is one of the best out there, and Texture could help Apple build on that with access to even more magazines. It could, for example, fill Apple News with even more stories from magazines you subscribe to or favorite from the service. That's just a guess, but it's a pretty good service that has so far (at least to me) floated under the radar.