While Apple fans wait for news about the upcoming iOS 18 update, the tech giant brought a fun feature to its iPhone when it released iOS 17. When Apple released that update in September, the company added crossword puzzles to the News app.
While crossword puzzles can be fun, these puzzles can also expand a person’s vocabulary and stimulate thinking skills, as well as provide a confidence boost, according to a study published in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.
To access crossword puzzles in the News app, you need a subscription to Apple News Plus, which costs $13 a month. You can try Apple News Plus for one month for free, or you can get the service free for three months when you purchase an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. A subscription to Apple News Plus is also part of the Apple One Premier package, which costs $38 per month and includes other services such as Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade.
Here’s how you can access daily crossword puzzles as an Apple News Plus subscriber.
Play crossword puzzles on Apple News
1. Open the Apple News app.
2. Tap Following in the menu at the bottom of the screen.
3. Tap Puzzle.
On the Puzzles page, you can find the latest crossword puzzles of the week. At the top of the page, you’ll also see options for Crossword and Mini Crossword, which are smaller crossword puzzles arranged on a 5×5 grid. Tap any of these options and the app will take you to the latest puzzles for any of the options.
You can also access the crossword puzzles by going to Apple News > Today and scrolling down the page until you see the Latest puzzles but this option was quite far down on my Today page.
How to play the puzzles
Once you’ve decided which puzzles to play, there are two ways to solve them: grid view and list view. By default, you will be taken to the grid view, which is a traditional crossword layout. You’ll see the entire grid, and if you tap a square, you’ll see a clue below the puzzle. You can also switch between vertical and horizontal tracks by tapping a square a second time or tapping the track.
The list view, on the other hand, avoids the traditional grid of a crossword puzzle and shows you all the clues and how many letters are in each answer in a list format. To access the list view, tap the bulleted list icon in the top left corner of your screen when you’re in a puzzle. As you enter letters in the list view, letters from other tracks begin to appear where the tracks intersect on the grid. I still think list view sounds difficult, but I’m not very good at crosswords to begin with.
How many puzzles are there?
There are two new crossword puzzles every day, a crossword puzzle and a mini crossword puzzle. There is also an archive of previous crossword puzzles that you can access. Follow the steps above and then tap Crossword or Mini Crossword. So, under the Latest puzzles, You should see Archive. Last month’s puzzles are listed in Archiveand if you touch the arrow next to Archive You can access puzzles dating back to June 2023.
For more information on iOS 17, check out what features could be coming to your iPhone in iOS 17.5 and our iOS 17 cheat sheet. You can also check out what Apple announced at its May event.
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