Understanding Newsstand Apps

Now that your Xcode project is configured for a Newsstand app, you’re probably ready to jump right in and start coding—not so fast. First, it’s a good idea to gain a solid grasp of how Newsstand actually works, what paths the information follows, and what information you as a developer need to track so that you can notify your users of new content.

Newsstand Kit Library and Issues

Remember that Newsstand is designed as a repository for publications, and more specifically, publications with periodical content like magazines and newspapers. The Newsstand Kit and its components were built from the ground up with these analogies and best practices in mind.

When building a Newsstand app, your content should easily be broken into issues. A magazine app might have a new issue every month, while a newspaper app might have a new issue every day. Each of these issues will be stored in a central library that can be accessed through the Newsstand Kit APIs. Appropriately, in Newstand Kit this central library is called NKLibrary (Newsstand Kit Library) while the individual issues are called NKIssues (Newstand Kit Issues).