Apple issued iOS 17.4 in March, and the update brought a bunch of new features to your iPhoneAs Podcast transcripts and more settings to protect your device from being stolen. When Apple released iOS 17 in September, the tech giant brought a fun new feature to the News app: crossword puzzles.
While crossword puzzles can be fun and entertaining, these puzzles can also expand one’s vocabulary and stimulate thinking skills, as well as boost self-confidence, according to a study published in the Archives of Pathology and Laboratory Medicine.
To access the crossword puzzles in the News app, you need it Apple News Plus subscription, which costs 13 dollars per month. You can try Apple News Plus for one month freeor you can get service for free for three months when you buy iPhone, iPad or Sword. A subscription to Apple News Plus is also part of the Apple One Premier package, which costs $38 per month and includes other services like Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade.
Here’s how you can access the daily crossword puzzles as an Apple News Plus subscriber.
Play crossword puzzles in Apple News
1. Open the Apple News app.
2. Touch Tracking in the menu at the bottom of the screen.
3. Touch Riddles.
On the Riddles page you can find the latest crossword puzzles of the week. At the top of the page you will also see options for Crossword puzzle and Crossword Mini, which are smaller crossword puzzles arranged in a 5×5 grid. Tap on any of these options and the app will take you to the latest puzzles for either option.
You can also access crossword puzzles by going to Apple News > Today and scroll down the page until you see Latest puzzlesbut this option was pretty far down on my Today page.
How to play puzzles
Once you’ve decided which puzzle to play, you can solve it in two ways: grid display and list view. By default, you’ll enter grid view, which is a traditional crossword layout. You see the entire grid, and if you tap a square, you’ll see a clue underneath the puzzle. You can also switch between vertical and horizontal tracks by tapping the square a second time or tapping the track.
List view, on the other hand, avoids the traditional crossword grid and shows you all the clues and how many letters each answer has in list form. To access the list view, tap the bulleted list icon in the upper left corner of the screen while in the puzzle. As you enter letters in list view, the letters in the other traces begin to fill in where the traces intersect on the grid. I still think the list view sounds difficult, but I’m also not good at solving crossword puzzles to begin with.
How many puzzles are there?
There are two new puzzles every day, a crossword and a mini crossword. There is also an archive of past crosswords that you can access. Follow the steps above and then tap on any Crossword puzzle or Crossword Mini. Then, under Latest puzzles you should see Archives. Last month’s puzzles are listed below Archivesand if you touch the arrow next to Archives you can access puzzles dating back to June 2023.
For more information about iOS 17, see the latest features in the iOS 17.4 and iOS 17.3. You can also check out ours iOS 17 cheats.