As expected, Apple is now summarising app alerts. I’ll admit that I was concerned for news publishers, but it may not be as bad as I feared. 

In the screenshots below, you’ll see how alerts are handled on the lock screen. Alerts are gathered together in segments with the header “Your next summary” and “Your afternoon summary.” Note that these alerts are summarised by app, not by content.  

What we are also seeing here is that an app with multiple updates — in this example The New York Times — has its own summarised alert (I don’t think we know whether this is based on volume or user interest). The summary alert manages to summarise the top three alerts on the lock screen (on the left above). When a user then taps on the summary, a list of the alerts show (on the right above).

So what is the upshot for news?  

On the downside, your alerts could be grouped into that first category, somewhat getting hidden in the noise of app alerts. On the upside, having multiple alerts show up at once, as The New York Times example, may lead to greater click-throughs as there are more subjects to choose from on both the lock screen and the ungrouped alerts. 

Once Apple Intelligence comes out of beta, we’ll get more data to know what the outcomes are likely to be and some best practices around how to manage this change. But one thing we can be sure of now: App traffic as we know it is about to change and we should prepare accordingly. 

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