Apple to launch a news subscription service, report says

About a month ago, Apple spent part of its enormous cash reserves on acquiring digital magazine subscription service Texture.

Now, according to a new report from Bloomberg, the company plans to put this acquisition to good use by launching its own news subscription service, integrated into Apple News.

Apple fired about 20 Texture employees right after the acquisition, and plans to fold the others and Texture's tech into its Apple News team, the report says. The updated Apple News app, which includes this new subscription service, should launch sometime in 2019.

There will be some sort of revenue split between Apple and the publishers who will be featured in the service, but there's no details on that.

Prior to the acquisition, Texture had been charging $9.99 a month and had featured more than 200 magazines including People, Time, National Geographic, Esquire, GQ, The Atlantic and Rolling Stone.

Apple News is currently a free app that delivers a personalized selection of content from a choice of publishers, with the ability to follow certain topics as well as subscribe to magazines and newspapers directly through news. It is only available in three markets: U.S., the UK and Australia. Before News, Apple had had Newsstand, which was essentially a market for purchasing subscriptions to individual magazines and newspapers.

Apple's services business is orders of magnitude smaller than its hardware business, but the company has had success with its Apple Music service, which currently boasts nearly 40 million subscribers.