I am well aware of this. But I do think that this APP is WotC's answer to our requests for the magazines.
Kinda. It's also they're answer to our requests for a physical mailing list sent to our homes, or a D&D broadstreet sold on the corner by a shabby urchin in a newsy cap.
Dragon+ is filling the gap until another company puts in a licensing request for the magazines.
Which won't happen as no one is remotely interested.
Gygax Magazine closed up shop and
Kobold Quarterly is long dead. Magazines are a giant financial dead end, and it's ridiculous to expect WotC to cling to an outdated delivery format because of nostalgia.
Magazines were already a dying format when WotC attempted to bring them in-house in 2008. Paizo had been struggling to keep the magazines afloat a good decade ago.
Even in magical and wonderous land of Theoretica where magazines flourish,
Dragon and
Dungeon occupy a weird space. What content would go in there? The D&D team seems uninterested in waves of new crunch, and
Unearthed Arcana serves the content testing function. Advertising and hype is done through social media. Finding new talent and publishing short adventures have been subsumed by the DMsGuild. Regular advice and gaming tips have long since been replaced by gaming blogs. Even letters to the editor and feedback is now replaced by tweeting at the designers directly.
Why buy a magazine when you can hit-up any of a dozen websites for equivalent content for free? Why flip through endless pages when you could search through a website for the exact adventure you need?