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The Atlantic's Magazine Content Comes to iPhone

If you've ever wished you could read stories from The Atlantic's print edition on your iPhone, you're finally in luck.

The Atlantic announced Friday that it has updated its iPhone app to give subscribers access to all of the magazine's content — including features, fiction and more — in addition to web content. The Atlantic's iPad app already features magazine content, but until now, users of the iPhone app could only access content published on TheAtlantic's various web properties, regardless of whether they subscribed to the print edition.

Kimberly Lau, VP and General Manager of The Atlantic Digital, tells Mashable that adding magazine content to the iPhone app had "always been on the road map," but the company wanted to ensure that the experience was different than the iPad and better suited to the smaller screen. To that end, magazine pages within the iPhone app are created using HTML rather than PDFs (as is the case with the iPad app) so that users can adjust the font size on their phones. Beyond that, the updated iPhone app lets users swipe between stories and retract menu bars to fit more text on the screen.

The Atlantic has also done away with the banner ad in the iPhone app in favor of interstitial ads. "On the iPhone in particular, one of the common pieces of feedback we got is that the banner took up too much of the screen real estate and basically interrupted the reading experience," Lau says. "To some extent, you want to get people's attention, but this was an example of a bad user experience and not particularly good for the advertiser either."

The hope is that adding magazine content to the iPhone app will boost digital magazine subscriptions. For those who don't have a print subscription, The Atlantic charges $6.99 for a single digital issue on the iPhone and or sign up for an annual digital subscription (10 issues) for $21.99.

While some publishers have questioned the value of developing native apps for iOS and other platforms, The Atlantic continues to double down on this strategy. The publishing company has iPhone apps for its flagship publication, as well as The Atlantic Wire, and according to Lau, it is planning to launch an iPhone app for The Atlantic Cities in the first half of this year.

"There is absolutely a viable audience and marketplace on Apple so we are definitely still continuing to invest there," Lau says. "We are making money there. We have a reason to be there: Our audience is there and they consume content that way."

The company has no plans to develop apps for other platforms at this point.

Images courtesy of The Atlantic

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