Lots of magazine publishers are starting to hop aboard the app train by offering up magazine subscriptions through their apps and allowing their customers to view and read entire magazines through their specially designed apps but now thanks to OnSwipe, the need for those apps could start seeing diminished use.
OnSwipe is a platform that would translate publishers’ existing content to look and feel like like a touch screen optimized app on various devices, like the iPad for instance. OnSwipe’s CEO Jason Baptiste said that he felt the iPad was designed to mostly browse the web and what he calls the “TV of this generation” so instead of users having to exit their browsers to launch their magazine apps, they will be able to achieve the look and feel of those apps right in the browsers instead, for example swiping would allow users to scroll through the pages much like how app magazines usually work and even connecting readers to social networking sites such as Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube which allow for quick sharing of interesting articles that readers come across.
All of this is by no means a bad thing for publishers since generally speaking the apps publishers provide for download are free, just that readers would be required to pay if they wish to read and subscribe to the magazines. On top of that OnSwipe can provide a way out for publishers who do not want to give Apple a cut for in-app subscriptions by keeping it browser based, much like how the New York Post has done, so we can actually go as far as to say that OnSwipe will actually be doing publishers a favor.
Best of all OnSwipe is also free of charge to publishers with OnSwipe taking a percentage cut from ad revenues instead. Check out the demo on OnSwipe in the video below.
Onswipe Demo Video from Onswipe on Vimeo.