Readers also spent significant time with The Daily Mail Newspaper app (215 minutes) which provides users with a digital edition of the Daily Mail and The Mail on Sunday on their phones. Other apps scoring well for time spent were The Sun (an average of 380 minutes per user), The Times and The Sunday Times app (351 minutes), magazine-focused app Readly (277 minutes) and The Telegraph (268 minutes). The 1.7m people who used DMGT’s most popular app in December each used the app for, on average, 400 minutes each during the month. When it comes to engagement the Mail Online app took the top spot. Instead the majority of the top 30 apps reached less than 1% of the population. Overall however, news apps remain niche players in the overall app market as well as the wider news market.Īpple News and BBC News were the only apps with an audience reach in the double figures by percentage. Previous Press Gazette analyses of the popularity of news apps using data from Sensor Tower revealed that aggregators are more widely-downloaded in the US and globally than in the UK where legacy media apps remain popular. The most popular legacy media apps after BBC News were Sky News (fourth place - 3.3m people and 7% reach), The Guardian (sixth place - 2.1m people and 4% reach) and Mail Online (1.7m people - 3% reach). The remaining apps were products of individual news brands - most often legacy media. It was one of eight news aggregators among the 30 most popular news apps by audience reach. The third most popular news app by audience, Indian app News Tag, reached a significant audience although a fraction of Apple News' or BBC News' numbers (3.8m people - 8% reach). The BBC however came out on top for total minutes spent with its news app with its audience spending a collective 2.2bn minutes accessing its content during the month - almost twice as much as Apple News (1.2bn minutes).
The BBC News app was accessed by 12.5m people (25% reach). The iPhone maker’s news app was used by 13.2m people – 27% of all internet users aged over 15 in the UK, the figures from UKOM endorsed Ipsos iris show. The Apple News app narrowly beat BBC News to take the spot of most popular news app in the UK in December, according to data from Ipsos iris.