Dries Buytaert

At yesterday's Worldwide Developer Conference keynote, Apple announced its annual updates to iOS, OS X, and the new watchOS. As usual, the Apple rumor blogs correctly predicted most of the important announcements weeks ago, but one important piece of news only leaked a few hours before the keynote: the launch of a new application called "News". Apple's News app press release noted: News provides beautiful content from the world's greatest sources, personalized for you.

Apple basically cloned Flipboard to create News. Flipboard was once Apple's "App of the Year" in 2010, and it remains one of the most popular reading applications on iOS. This isn't the first time Apple has chosen to compete with its ecosystem of app developers. There is even a term for it, called "Sherlocking".

But forget about Apple's impact on Flipboard for a minute. The release of the News app signifies a more important shift in the evolution of the web, the web content management industry, and the publishing industry.

Impact on content management platforms

Why is Apple's News app a big deal for content management platforms? When you can read all the news you are interested in in News, you no longer have to visit websites for it. It's a big deal because there are half a billion active iOS devices and Apple will ship its News app to every single one of them. It will accelerate the fact that websites are becoming less relevant as an end-point destination.

Some of the other new iOS 9 features will add fuel to the fire. For example, Apple's search service Spotlight will also get an upgrade, allowing third-party services to work directly with Apple's search feature. Spotlight can now "deep link" to content inside of a website or application, further eliminating website or applications as end-points. You could search for a restaurant in Yelp directly from your home screen, and go straight to Yelp's result page without having to open the Yelp website or application. Add to that the Apple Watch which doesn't even ship with a web browser, and it's clear that Apple is about to accelerate the post-browser era of the web.

The secret to the News app is the new Apple News Format; rumored to be a RSS-like data feed with support for additional design elements like images, videos, custom fonts, and more. Apple uses these feeds to aggregate content from different news sources, uses machine learning to match the best content to a given user, and provides a clean, consistent look and feel for articles coming from the various news sources. That is the long way of saying that Apple decides what the best content is for you, and what the best format is to deliver it in. It is a profound change, but for most people this will actually be a superior user experience.

The release of Apple News is further proof that data-driven experiences will be the norm and of what I have been calling The Big Reverse of the Web. The fact that for the web to reach its full potential, it will go through a massive re-architecture from a pull-based architecture to a push-based architecture. After the Big Reverse of the Web is complete, content will find you, rather than you having to find content. Apple's News and Flipboard are examples of what such push-based experiences look like; they "push" relevant and interesting content to you rather than you having to "pull" the news from multiple sources yourself.

When content is "pushed" to you by smart aggregators, using a regular web browser doesn't make much sense. You benefit from a different kind of browser for the web. For content management platforms, it redefines the browser and websites as end-points; de-emphasizing the role of presentation while increasing the importance of structured content and metadata. Given Apple's massive install base, the launch of its News app will further accelerate the post-browser era of the web.

I don't know about your content management platform, but Drupal is ready for it. It was designed for a content-first mentality while many competitive content management systems continue to rely on a dated page-centric content model. It was also designed to be a content repository capable of outputting content in multiple formats to multiple end-points.

Impact on publishing industry

Forget the impact on Flipboard or on content management platforms, the impact on the publishing world will even be more significant. The risk for publishers is that they are being disintermediated as the distribution channel and that their brands become less useful. It marks a powerful transformation that could de-materialize and de-monetize much of the current web and publishing industry.

Because of Apple's massive installed base, Apple will now own a large part of the distribution channel and it will have an outsized influence on what hundreds of millions of users will read. If we've learned one thing in the short history of the Internet, it is that jumping over middlemen is a well-known recipe for success.

This doesn't mean that online news media have lost. Maybe it can actually save them? Apple could provide publishers large and small with an immense distribution channel by giving them the ability to reach every iOS user. Apple isn't alone with this vision, as Facebook recently rolled out an experiment with select publishers like Buzzfeed and the New York Times called Instant Articles.

In a "push economy" where a publisher's brand is devalued and news is selected by smart aggregators, the best content could win; not just the content that is associated with the most well-known publishing brands with the biggest marketing budgets. Publishers will be incentivized to create more high-quality content — content that is highly customized to different target audiences, rather than generic content that appeals to large groups of people. Success will likely rely on Apple's ability to use data to match the right content to each user.

Conclusion

This isn't necessarily bad. In my opinion, the web isn't dead, it's just getting started. We're well into the post-PC era, and now Apple is helping to move consumers beyond the browser. It's hard to not be cautiously optimistic about the long-term implications of these developments.