Apple News is the most-viewed news app in the UK, but BBC is used for more time

In figures for December 2021, Apple News saw 13.2 million users, or over a quarter of UK internet users, beating BBC News for overall user base, but not time viewed.

New figures from the UK's Press Gazette says that 27% of all internet users aged over 15, used the Apple News app in December 2021. On average, each person spent 93 minutes using it across the month, or 1.2 billion minutes in total.

In comparison, the second most used one was the BBC News app. That accounted for 25.2% of all internet users over the age of 15, but it also had a total of 2.2 billion minutes read.

The rest of the chart includes news aggregators NewsTag at number 3, and Upday at number five.

More recognizable names, in the UK, include Sky News which came in fourth with 3.3 million users. The Guardian was sixth on 2.1 million, while controversial tabloid The Sun app was 15th on 0.3 million.

Of Apple's usually perceived rivals, Google News took eighth spot with 1.6 million users, and Microsoft Start failed to chart.

Top 20 UK news apps

Press Gazette says its figures are partly taken from a survey of 10,000 users who have agreed to "have meters installed across 25,000 personal devices" to measure website and app usage.

Despite that mention of website usage, the Press Gazette figures appear to be specifically about the use of news apps. It does not, then, seem to count users who access such services via the browsers on their phones or tablets.

BBC News has a full news website, while Apple News's site is solely a promotion for the app and the Apple News+ subscription.

Microsoft Start is the new name for what was Microsoft News. In 2018, AppleInsider compared the then Microsoft News with Apple News and Google News, to determine which suited most users best.

4 Comments

haikus 10 Years · 12 comments

About 2 years ago

What’s Apple News?
ah, that app that only exists in 3 countries

GeorgeBMac 8 Years · 11421 comments

Apple News keeps getting better while BBC keeps getting increasingly biased -- pushing the Nationalism and cold war thinking of the current government there.

But, it's still a good source of news and contains a lot human interest stuff as well.

elijahg 18 Years · 2842 comments

GeorgeBMac said:

Apple News keeps getting better while BBC keeps getting increasingly biased -- pushing the Nationalism and cold war thinking of the current government there.

But, it's still a good source of news and contains a lot human interest stuff as well.
Right ok.

elijahg said:

GeorgeBMac said:

Apple News keeps getting better while BBC keeps getting increasingly biased -- pushing the Nationalism and cold war thinking of the current government there.

But, it's still a good source of news and contains a lot human interest stuff as well.

Right ok.

Pretty graphs. But graphs prove nothing.
What does are articles the one claiming that the UK will never permit Russia from taking Ukraine back. LOL... Typical right wing, nationalist bullshit. What does washed up old UK intend to do about it? Send the U;S. army to attack Russia?