NoNewsIsGoodNews for jailbroken iPad lets you get rid of Newsstand but keep the magazines
I was very happy when Newsstand hit in iOS 5, because I love digital magazines. Since then though I’ve been confronted with the harsh reality: What Newsstand offers isn’t magazines. It’s some sort of weird mashup of videos, web pages and magazine style paging that I find the be a true nightmare to navigate. Magazines have pages. Newsstand magazines have pages, which scroll, appear differently when you turn your iPad, and for good measure, the magazines are often 500MB beasts that take ages to download because of auto-play video ads!
Long story short, I don’t use it. Unfortunately that leaves me with a Newsstand icon that I don’t use, and would rather not have at all. There have been both jailbreak and non-jailbreak ways of getting rid of it more or less since it came out, and one of those ways is NoNewsIsGoodNews in Cydia. It’s a free app that essentially turns the clock back to iOS 4 as far as magazines go. The Newsstand icon will be gone, and unlike some other solutions, it actually leaves any magazines you do want to keep intact, but as the old style apps that was the standard in iOS 4. If you happen to not have any magazines left in Newsstand, it will of course not leave anything at all on your home screen.
Newsstand is a great idea, and I’m sure that there are tons of fans of the new interactive magazine style out there. I’m simply not one of them. If you’re not either, or if you simple don’t use magazines, you can find the app in Cydia.
