Are Magazine Apps Dead?

What do you think of the current format and presentation of magazine apps? Do you think that the dominance of DPS as a production/creation tool has had a good or bad effect?

Joe Zeff: It’s easy to blame Adobe DPS for the spate of lookalike magazines; instead, I blame the publishers. They blindly followed AAM née ABC guidelines and created digital magazines that were hardly different from print. They prioritized customer retention over customer acquisition and focused on rate base expansion instead of new product development.

They have failed to excite advertisers, blaming weak CPM numbers that could be strengthened by aggregating audiences through networks. As our projects at Joe Zeff Design have demonstrated again and again, DPS is a wonderful platform for launching new products that engage consumers. A la carte magazines, interactive modules, utility-based applications — they’re all possible today, thanks in part to Adobe DPS.  

That’s not to say DPS couldn’t be better. The platform currently includes the ability to publish folio content to Adobe’s proprietary web viewer. Most DPS features work fine; there remain issues with scaling and swiping. If publishers could push more dynamic experiences to the web, they could reach larger audiences with app-like content and better address the opportunity to sell interactive advertising.  

Josh Klenert: DPS has its pros and cons, but it’s not the only solution for publishing a magazine app. If building your own app is not a solution there are plenty of other options out there including PRSS, DShare, Mag+, and Readymag.  

Jeremy Leslie: DPS served a vital role kick starting publishers into thinking about app editions, but in the longer term has proved to be a misdirection. I’m sure most of us remember opening early editions of the Wired app on which DPS was modeled. Hugely exciting, but absurdly over-promising. What budget and resource did the Wired team have for those issues? (And why are those first issues unavailable to view today?) DPS sold itself as a plug-in for InDesign, something easily assimilated into the workflow, but its central conceptual link to the printed page is flawed.

It was the result of a rushed development to meet the iPad launch and has served the industry poorly since. But it has had a domino effect on publishers and their HTML developers. Snowfall and other attempts at web-based long form editorial design have been encouraged by apps.