Texture to shut down on May 28 following the launch of Apple News+

A great portion of the development process for Apple's new subscription service for magazines and newspapers built upon Texture, a subscription-based digital magazine service acquired by the tech giant in March of last year. Now that Apple News+ has been officially launched, Texture has announced that it will be pulling the plug on its service on May 28.

Existing customers using Apple products won't be left out in the cold as they will be given a free month of Apple News+ subscription as part of the transition to continue reading their favorite titles. After the trial period, the $9.99 monthly fee will apply.

However, since Apple News+ is available only on Apple devices, Texture's announcement has obviously displeased many Android users who have subscribed to Texture for a long time. A lot of them took to Twitter to air their frustration at the upcoming closure:

Too bad that @apple bought @texture and is now hiking the price and closing it down for Android users. Does seem like the #AppleWay I guess. https://t.co/hNVMGSWtSC
— Brian Mulawka 🇨🇦 (@BrianMulawka) March 29, 2019

@texture @Apple C'mon. There's already a viable, working Texture app for Android.. isn't it just kinda petty and reductive to remove support for an entire platform? I guess thanks for making it so easy to cancel my sub, though?
— ry2k🐛 (@ry2k) March 29, 2019

While Texture's imminent shutdown is a logical step to eliminate duplicate services, the move might come a bit too early as Apple has yet to offer a solution to non-iOS and macOS users other than buying an iPhone or iPad. And unless it does so anytime soon, many will lose access to their favorite magazines that they've been used to reading via Texture.

Source: Texture via TechCrunch