With the addition of customised local news for Toronto and Montreal to the regular national reporting, Apple News and Apple News+ have been re-launched in Canada.
Local news was first introduced in 2020 and has since been rolled out to a few of communities around the United States. At the very least, it’s starting to roll out in Toronto and Montreal at this point.
Rene Ritchie was the first to notice that Apple News now has a separate local page for each of the two locations in question. However, only Toronto’s page has news articles as of the time of this writing.
Toronto and Montreal will each have a News & Politics top page when it is completely implemented. Aside from sports and arts, there are also specialised sections dedicated to business and real estate, as well as food and drink.
Toronto’s curated pages are shown in English by default. Category heads in French appear in the as-yet-unreleased Montreal version.
Toronto and Montreal are the first two cities in Canada to get Apple News local news coverage. It comes on the heels of the service’s recent growth in the United States.
The Bay Area, Charlotte, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Sacramento, San Antonio, San Diego, and Washington DC are all covered by local news in the United States.
Earlier this month the Bay Area was added to the service, which was already extended twice last year in the US.
An Apple News daily email aimed at San Francisco and the surrounding area was launched on Tuesday. In the News app, readers may access the most popular news from a variety of media sources, including national publications as well as regional publications.
Apple News’ Bay Area newsletter will cover a wide range of topics, including sports, politics, cuisine, and nightlife. Local organisations such as the San Francisco Chronicle and KQED have teamed with Apple to provide the daily bulletin..
Earlier this year, we learnt that Apple News is the most popular news app in the United Kingdom, with one caveat:
According to Press Gazette, although Apple News had the most users, BBC News had the most time spent on the app.
For the month of December 2021, BBC users spent 2.2 billion minutes on the app, while Apple News users spent 1.2 billion minutes. That adds out to an average of 172 minutes per month for BBC News and 93 minutes for Apple News.