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The Times E-Paper for iPad

timesdigitaldevelopment:

On 27th April we released an ‘e-paper’ app for the iPad. This app is a brand new product for The Times and Sunday Times and allows subscribers to read a PDF ‘facsimile’ of the print edition of the newspaper.

Some may see this as a perplexing almost retrogressive step for a brand committed to a digital future. In fact, this product was developed and released for two reasons:

1. As a response to customer requests to be able to read the print edition in a digital format.

2. To allow customers with an iPad1 who have been experiencing problems reading the 7 Day iPad app the opportunity to read the edition on their tablets.

The app publishes all the supplements of The Times and The Sunday Times with the exception of the magazines which will be added within the next few weeks. The product is not a newsstand product to avoid the confusion of having two version of The Times next to each other as we still prefer and wish to promote our native digital 7 Day App as the best way to read our content digitally.

Although not exclusively available for iPad 1, all developers and publishers face the challenge of supporting hardware that is increasingly outdated as software develops and the limitations of devices that are still only three years old becoming increasingly apparent.

Ever since Apple effectively discontinued support for the iPad1 by restricting the latest version of its operating system (iOS6) to iPad2 and above there has been an ongoing debate in the development community regarding the level of support to provide for legacy versions of iOS and hence iPad1 owners as a consequence.

With the pace of product development since the inception of the iPad only 3 years ago, it is easy to overlook the fact that the original iPad was an expensive, premium purchase of around £400 and the notion that it is already obsolete and must be upgraded is not surprisingly hard to swallow for many of our customers. There is no evidence that Apple deliberately discontinues its products to drive sales of its new products - in fact it is generally accepted that they do this via the release of great new features and improvements in their new releases.

Around 12% of The Times tablet customers own an iPad1 and, although we have no current plans to discontinue support for iOS5 in forthcoming releases, it is increasingly problematic developing a software product that takes advantages of current system and device capabilities  (in terms of processing power and memory) but is still performant on older models.

@pauljackson2209