As the developer Steve Troughton-Smith shares on Twitter, the contents of the Apple News+ subscription service seem to be visible without restriction.
The developer notes that Apple uses the pdf format to deliver the magazine content. However, this is not protected by copy protection or any other means against duplication.
Apple News+ Magazines doesn't seem to use FairPlay (?), and preloads the first few pages of PDF-based issues regardless of whether you have a subscription (?♂). Thus, you can just rip them out of the cache on macOS and reconstitute the original PDF. Kinda irresponsible pic.twitter.com/FudLFjngZe
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) 25 March 2019
The preview of the offered contents generates an overview file on macOS, which reveals all URLs to the pdfs unsecured. This only page by page, but all content is open, even without paying for a subscription.
It gets better! Even without a subscription, the magazine preview in Apple News downloads a manifest which happens to list all the pages. All of which, hosted in public, sans any protection. So it takes minutes to write a tool that downloads an entire magazine issue page by page pic.twitter.com/anh4BoGKN6
— Steve Troughton-Smith (@stroughtonsmith) 26 March 2019
This circumstance is likely to change quite soon. Surprisingly, however, we find that Apple actually just uses pdfs as the transport format and nothing proprietary that would only work within News+.
