∞ The Loop magazine for iPhone and iPad released
The Loop magazine for iPhone and iPad released — On New Years Eve last year I said that I had some big plans for The Loop in 2013. The biggest of those plans is The Loop magazine for iPhone and iPad, which is available from the App Store today.
Context & Ripple Effects
The Loop's magazine app lands at the tail end of a three-year run-up in tablet publishing: Time Inc.'s push to break the iPad logjam in 2010, Apple crowning Flipboard its iPad App of the Year that December, Wired experimenting with free issues in 2011, and Next Issue opening its all-you-can-read magazine store on the iPad in 2012. What began as a big-publisher land grab has been steadily lowering the barrier for smaller players.
That is what makes this release notable: The Loop is an independent Apple-focused site, not a legacy magazine, yet it is shipping a native iOS publication as part of the expansion plans its editor teased on New Year's Eve. The story also travelled unusually widely for an indie launch, drawing pickups from iMore, TUAW, MacStories, App Advice, The Next Web, iMore again, and TypeEngine — a signal that the Apple-commentary community treats one of its own going native-format as a template test.
First-order effects
- The Loop gains direct App Store distribution and a potential subscription channel, converting blog readers into app-based customers without relying on a third-party newsstand.
Second-order effects
- Other independent blogs in the Apple-enthusiast space face a visible proof point: if a single-site operation can ship a polished iOS magazine, the bar for reader expectations around format and delivery rises for peers who stay web-only.
- Publishing-platform vendors such as TypeEngine, which covered the launch from inside its own target market, get a reference customer to market to the next wave of small publishers.
Third-order effects
- If indie launches keep working through the App Store rather than legacy distribution, the structural split in magazines shifts from big publisher versus newcomer toward those with native apps versus those renting shelf space — a trajectory the corpus has tracked since the 2010 iPad logjam.
The trend: iOS magazine publishing is broadening from legacy-title ports like The New Yorker's move to the iPhone toward native apps built by independent publishers themselves.