iOS 17: How You Can Access Daily Crossword Puzzles in the News App – CNET [CNET]

Apple News Plus subscribers can access these games now.

When Apple released iOS 17 on Sept. 18, the company gave iPhone users many new and useful features, like StandBy mode, offline maps and Check In. And crossword puzzles in the News app are among the fun new features added to the OS.

To access these puzzles, you need an Apple News Plus subscription, which costs $13 a month. However, you can try Apple News Plus for one month for free, or you can get the service for free for three months with the purchase of an iPhone, iPad or Mac. An Apple News Plus subscription is also part of the Apple One Premier bundle, which costs $38 a month and includes other services like Apple TV Plus and Apple Arcade.

Here’s how you can access daily crossword puzzles as an Apple News Plus subscriber.

Play crossword puzzles in Apple News

1. Open the Apple News app.
2. Tap Following in the menu across the bottom of your screen.
3. Tap Puzzles.

You can also access crossword puzzles by going to Apple News > Today > Latest Puzzles — this option was pretty far down my Today page.

From the puzzles page, you can find the latest crosswords from the week. Across the top of the page, you’ll also see options for Crossword and Crossword Mini, which are smaller crossword puzzles arranged in a 5×5 grid. Tap either of these options, and the app takes you to the latest puzzles for either choice.

How to play the puzzles

Once you’ve decided on which puzzle to play, there are two ways you can solve them: grid view and list view. By default you’ll enter grid view which is a traditional crossword puzzle layout. You see the whole grid, and if you tap a square you’ll see a clue below the puzzle. You can also switch between vertical and horizontal clues by tapping a square a second time or tapping the clue.

List view, on the other hand, eschews 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 list view, tap the bulleted list icon in the top left corner of your screen when you are in a puzzle. As you enter letters in list view, letters in other clues begin populating where the clues intersect on the grid. I still think list view sounds tough, but I’m also not very good at crossword puzzles to start with.

How many puzzles are there?

There are two new puzzles every day, a crossword and a crossword mini. It appears the puzzles are accessible for about a month after they are published, so you have access to a small archive of crosswords you can play. This is also a new feature, so the number of available puzzles could change. 

For more on iOS 17, check out my review of iOS 17 and our iOS 17 cheat sheet.