Apple News has emerged as the most popular news app in the United Kingdom in terms of views with 13.2 million users. It beat the BBC, which reached 12.5 million users, to come in the second position. Apple News reached 27% of all internet users in the UK, while the BBC reached 25% of internet users, according to data shared by Press-Gazette.
But while Apple News beat the BBC in terms of views, the latter emerged as the overall winner in terms of the time users spend on the news apps. Data revealed that users spent 1.2 billion minutes on Apple News, averaging 93 minutes per user; while users spent 2.2 billion minutes on the BBC News app, meaning that each user spent about 172 minutes on average on the app.
The news app News Tag came third with 3.8 million people reaching or 8% of the internet population in the UK – averaging 117 million minutes used at 31 minutes per person. Sky News came fourth with 3.3 million users at 366.9 million minutes at 111 minutes per user; while Upday came at fifth position with 2.2 million users and 60 million minutes at 28 minutes per user.
The last at 20th position is Daily Express at 0.2 million users at 39.1 million minutes at 178 minutes per user on average.
This data was for the top news apps used in the UK in December 2021. Press-Gazette revealed the data was generated partly by 10,000 survey respondents who installed meters on 25,000 devices to monitor website and app users. It appears however that the data did not account for users who used the news apps via phone browsers and tablets.
Although Apple News trumped the BBC in terms of views, the news app aggregates news items from various sources to provide wider content offerings while the BBC provides real news coverage by real journalists. As interesting as this new data is, internet users and news consumers want to know the best news aggregator among Microsoft Start (formerly Microsoft News), Apple News, and Google News.