The New York Times is redesigning its app to highlight a universe that goes beyond just news

I've had the New York Times app on my phone for almost as long as I've owned a smartphone, and my experience with it has remained mostly the same over the years. A main tab showed breaking news, and there were a few other tab buttons that I rarely used except to occasionally browse the Sections tab when I was looking for something specific. Over the years, encouraged by the Times itself, I've also added the company's other apps to my phone; I check tennis and Formula 1 news in the Athletic app, send my Connections solutions to my friends in the Games app, and find recipes in the Cooking app. Last year the newspaper also launched an audio app.

The idea seemed to be that each Times offering was its own separate planet in the Gray Lady's solar system: Visit the main New York Times app for the news, and go to the other apps for the other stuff (but also for audio). and games also have their own tabs in the Times app, no doubt thanks to the popularity of The Daily, Connections and Wordle. But a new redesign that rolled out to some users earlier this week and officially rolls out Wednesday changes all that. It's the first major redesign of the Times app since the app launched in 2008.

“We hear a lot from readers about how we produce such great journalism, and it's really hard to find it all,” Emily Withrow, SVP of product at the Times, told me. “It’s a classic real estate problem. Often we are tied to having something on the home screen once a day, which is then replaced by something else.”

So the solution was to create more home screens.

In the redesigned app, there are still four tabs at the bottom – Home, Listen, Play and You – where users can follow the topics that interest them, but a bar at the top of the Home tab ” will display a list of sections that users can swipe through. Swiping right takes users to sections of the Times' core product – Great Reads, Lifestyle, Opinion. (There is also a section for the 2024 election; this is expected to be replaced by another topic section after November). Swiping left takes users to the Times' sub-brands: The Athletic, Cooking, Wirecutter and Games.

The redesign is not intended to replace or phase out the other apps the Times has developed over the years. In the main app, the sections for each sub-brand are not as comprehensive as in the standalone apps. For example, the cooking section displays recipes, but links to the cooking app for features like the recipe box.

“We’re not building a mega-app,” said Kristen Dudish, vice president of product design at the Times. “We’re basically giving you a preview of everything so you can discover it in the News app as part of the New York Times universe.”

The redesigned app is intended to be the entry point to everything the Times has to offer — especially if you have an all-access subscription, which, as we mentioned, the company has been pushing. (As of August, more than half of the Times' 10.2 million digital-only subscribers paid for more than one Times product.) And it is increasingly the way most people experience Times journalism; Subscribers spend twice as much time in the app as on the website, and it is typically the channel that drives the most active days. The vast majority (90%) of people who open the app one week will return to it the next.

For an All Access user swiping through the app, the message says, “These are all you get.” Someone who might only subscribe to one or two Times products, on the other hand, can do the same as an All Access subscriber scroll through all the sections and read the headlines but hits the paywall as soon as he tries to access his content The subscription does not provide access to; The message for them is essentially, “These are all the things you’re missing.”

The app is also proof that the Times is not just a news company, but also a technology company in its own right. The company employs hundreds of software engineers on various teams and is in lengthy contract negotiations with the Times Tech Guild, which represents 600 members; The union recently threatened a strike on Election Day. (A Times spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication about how the redesign will affect tech workers; this story will be updated if they respond.)

In some ways, the experience reminded me of the feeling of picking up a thick Sunday newspaper and browsing through the supplements. But it also reminded me of switching between feeds from Bluesky or X, which Withrow and Dudish themselves admitted; They themselves often referred to the sections as “feeds”, although they were more likely designed by a (human) editorial hand.

The redesign is also inspired by social media in other ways. “We believe that the vast majority of people opening our app right now are looking for something to read. “Sometimes it's something very serious, and sometimes it's a viral story about a bad art friend,” Withrow said. “But people often change modes very quickly. Because of their social media feeds, they are more used to seeing something really stupid next to something really serious. You’re in reading mode and then switch to video mode at the right moment because you’re interested in a piece of content (that popped up in your feed).”

“What we’re trying to say,” she added, “is that we have many other modes besides just reading.”