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Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

781 points by newscracker 7y ago

koustubhs 7y ago
I just went through the comments discussing general frustration with the behaviour of Apple products. I think it is time to escape the walled garden of Apple Inc. by using, maintaining, creating or paying for the programs from the tree of FLOSS. Your opinion will be heard, and open standards adhered to as far as FLOSS is concerned. For those of you complain about lack of good hardware, there are some amazing hardware solutions like system76 for hardware that is made for GNU/Linux.
- BinaryIdiot 7y ago
  No phones, though. It's pretty much impossible (especially for the non-technical person) to use anything but iOS or Android and actually be able to do stuff other than calling people.
  - mantap 7y ago
    Sounds good to me. I only use my phone for web browsing, chatting and taking pictures, plus a few easily replaceable commodity apps. The hardest thing to replace would be whatsapp since they really have us RestOfTheWorlders locked in good. The reason I stick to iOS is because Android is insufficiently focused on security and privacy, but if an OpenBSD of phones came along I'd happily use it.
spacemonkey92 7y ago
When I first created this app "7Web"(https://7web.co https://7web.co) couple of years back many suggested why don't I just use RSS feeds. Personally I'm not a big fan of RSS feeds mainly because I miss the familiarity and UX of the original website where I spend half the time browsing through Desktop and rest on mobile/iPad. I thought its just me but many of my users still use this app everyday.
matt_the_bass 7y ago
Funny this came up today. I was just trying to generate an RSS query from archive.org so that I could load a set of search results as a podcast on my phone. Every time I tried the archive.org advanced search RSS results, my iPhone kept redirecting to News app. Super annoying. I ended up just figuring out the syntax manually and typing it into a text editor before copy/pasting to Podcasts.
skinnyasianboi 7y ago
RSS feeds for the win. It keeps my feed clean and chronologically ordered.
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
Now, this is why I'm worried about Apple's supposed Internet; it could just become Intranet.
kingludite 7y ago
I test RSS/Atom readers/aggregators with an OPML with at least 2000 entries in it. Most look pretty bad after that... they kinda all looked pretty b...baaad. (My own was never ready for normal use) My bias has it that Apple news doesn't sound good enough to try. It would be so cool if someone wrote a really good FOSS RSS Aggregator - honestly. It would make my day every day. I would also like a really good news group reader, a really good IRC client, a better mail client and a really good text/code editor. (etc) Shards of awesome are spread out over 10 000 applications.
lawrenceyan 7y ago
Ahh, the smell of monopoly in the air. Perhaps it's time to take a look at breaking up Apple? /s
newscracker 7y ago
Apple News was already flakey and unreliable in the sources (websites) it would allow to be added. With its highly limited geographical availability (years after launching) and its problematic focus on News+, I switched back to a plain RSS Reader to follow specific sites. Apple News seems like a niche product with hardly any technical effort put into it. In comparison, Google News, with its ads, generally looks like a more comprehensive choice for news. Not to mention it’s also “free” (of course, it never allowed, AFAIK, adding RSS feeds from any site).
- Shivetya 7y ago
  doesn't matter if it is half done or not as feature complete as other sites, it just is the default on an iPad so people like my parents end up using it because Apple makes sure to highlight it being added. so for those who did not consider looking for a source of news and one just appears it pretty much is a lock. the local newspaper (AJC) has their own app but its not great and worse when sending links they don't format to the device opening it; comics are the worst as half the frames are missing
- iscrewyou 7y ago
  Which RSS reader do you use?
  - newscracker 7y ago
    I use Reeder 3 on iOS and NetNewsWire on Mac. NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader. An iOS version (also free) is coming in the first quarter of 2020.
  - mhb 7y ago
    Not the OP, but https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ is very nice.
    - asymmetric 7y ago
      Is there a self-hosted RSS reader that does feed de-summarization, like BazQux seems to do?
modmans2nd 7y ago
Flipboard is better than any news app I’ve used
- skyyler 7y ago
  I've never used it. Why do you like Flipboard? Why do you dislike other news apps? How much does it cost? If it's free, how do they monetise?
  - modmans2nd 7y ago
    It’s free. You set up your likes and can mute news sources the. You can add RSS feeds you want to read as well. It lets you have the most control over your news feed than anyone else.
- dcreemer 7y ago
  and it supports RSS feeds -- paste the link into the search box
simonw 7y ago
The weirdest thing about this is that Apple News still hijacks links to Atom/RSS feeds - so if you click on one of those links in Mobile Safari you'll be bounced to the News app, which will then display an error. Here's a video I recorded of this behaviour: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297 I think I'd rather they displayed a dump of ugly XML in the browser, just so I could copy and paste the URL into a feed reading app (I quite like Reeder for iOS and OSX these days).
- Wowfunhappy 7y ago
  Y'know, that makes me wonder... what if the "removal" of RSS support is just a bug?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    It is not.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      How do you know? I'm interested!
- oefrha 7y ago
  Safari on iOS 13 also got rid of the option to copy links of unsupported schemes, e.g. magnet. Now however you click you always get a link not supported message. Very frustrating. “Desktop class web browsing on the iPad”, except we’re getting rid of link copying. Ridiculous.
- firloop 7y ago
  For the link hijacking, it's worth noting that Apple News only exists/is pre-installed in a handful of markets and is uninstallable. But yeah, baffling.
  - microcolonel 7y ago
    What if you want to use both Apple News and RSS feeds on one phone? I know it sounds crazy, I'm asking for a friend.
LeoPanthera 7y ago
Honestly I didn't even know that you could add RSS feeds to Apple News. But I already stopped using it, because no matter how often I thumbed-up real news, and thumbed-down clickbait and ads, the "front page" was always a frustrating mix of mostly clickbait and ads. I currently use the Google News app on my iPhone for "real" headline news, but I'm not super happy about it.
- kevindong 7y ago
  I personally blocked quite a few channels [0] on Apple News on my iPhone and the experience is a lot better now consequently. Despite what Apple says about their curation policies, the vast majority of content of the channels I blocked was pure junk/clickbait. [0]: In alphabetical order: 9to5Mac, BGR, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Conde Nast Traveler, Cosmopolitan, Cult of mac, Electrek, FOOD & WINE, Forbes, iMangoss, Luxury Travel Diary, Mashable, NowThis, Page Six, People, Travel + Leisure
  - jakebasile 7y ago
    I've blocked something like 50+ "sources" on Apple News, but more pop up every week or so. I refuse to believe they curate it at all.
    - reaperducer 7y ago
      Portions of Apple News are curated, not the entire thing.
- reaperducer 7y ago
  IME, the thumbs don't do anything. The only way to have a real affect on your news feed is to block channels. For example, I follow the Chicago Sun-Times. And every day Apple News shows me the Sun-Times horoscope. And every day I give it a thumb's down. Every. Single. Day. 400+ thumbs later, it still shows up every day.
  - catalogia 7y ago
danso 7y ago
Not to minimize the concern over further erosion of RSS support, but I was surprised Apple News supported it at all. I follow a lot of media people on Twitter — a group who arguably is as still vocal (if not more) about Google Reader’s demise as tech people — and I can’t recall any of them mentioning using Apple News as an RSS reader (and just did a Twitter history search for “Apple news rss” to confirm my offhand guess). Was the functionality to add RSS buried or otherwise hindered? That said, I already long ago followed the author’s advice to “uninstall/remove Apple News”. The app experience was so terrible (at the time, at least) that I hated being sent to it when clicking tweeted links that were shared from Apple News.
- tedunangst 7y ago
  I may be mistaken, but I didn't think the news app ever supported arbitrary user specified feeds.
cpach 7y ago
If you want RSS on Macos, take a look at Netnewswire: https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/
- bencollier49 7y ago
  I'm surprised they've not banned that because it replicates the functionality of one of their apps, or something.
  - koheripbal 7y ago
    Why would providing similar behavior to an OS app warrant a ban? Many many apps on various OSes supplement default OS apps.
    - CamperBob2 7y ago
      That's Apple for you. North Korea with stock options.
    - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
      This was in fact a policy very early in the iOS app store's history. Not for a long time though.
      - benologist 7y ago
        It's still in effect and the most recent example would be banning software monitoring usage after Apple replicated the functionality themselves. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/27/tech/apple-screen-time-app-store-banned-report/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/27/tech/apple-screen-time-ap...
        pseudalopex 7y ago
        Apple replicated the functionality so they could crack down on third parties abusing enterprise device management.
kmfrk 7y ago
I remember trying to set up a site for Apple News three years ago, and as I updated my profile, RSS support disappeared. Apparently, it was a feature and not a bug. I abandoned Apple News pretty quickly as it became clear that it requires a dedicated person maintaining Apple News support.
Borog30 7y ago
Low
Borog30 7y ago
Hellow
api 7y ago
Just install a real RSS reader. There are many for every platform.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
superfist 7y ago
Not entirely related, but I want to mention that we have almost 2020 and Safari still doesn't support service workers push notifications (Push API). Shame on you Apple.
- joering2 7y ago
  This is how apple.com looks like on Safari (c) by Apple: https://ibb.co/ct6LTB0 https://ibb.co/ct6LTB0
  - mikewhy 7y ago
    That's Safari for Windows. Safari for Windows was discontinued in 2012, almost 8 years ago.
  - mffnbs 7y ago
    How well does the page render on a legacy version of IE running on a Mac?
- npo9 7y ago
  Maybe I’m old school, but I don’t want push notifications from my web browser.
  - phailhaus 7y ago
    That's fine, you can just not subscribe. But other people do want push notifications, like for emails.
    - sangnoir 7y ago
      Also, notifications can be used to replace emails. Instead of being sent an email from a forum when someone replies to my comment (with a link) - I'd rather have the browser do that (with my permission).
  - superfist 7y ago
    It's quite important/basic feature required in most PWA use cases. Such feature will result in number of apps shiped outside App Store. This is probably why they delay it.
mastrsushi 7y ago
More people spend time worrying about the decline of RSS than the amount of people actually using RSS.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Well, I discovered this topic via RSS in Feedly. Pretty lively dead standard!
- themagician 7y ago
  The decline of RSS has ruined the internet for me. I’m not being hyperbolic either. RSS effectively died and has been replaced with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds. Even if RSS still technical exists for some content, it’s not the same. What was great about RSS is it was pure. If content creators and publishers wanted to put ads in the feed they could and you knew you were directly supporting them. We didn’t have this stupid “likes” garbage that people were competing for. I find myself just consuming a lot less content on the internet. I’d rather just not participate than have to wade through the bullshit that’s become “social media.”
  - jauke 7y ago
    I consume most content via RSS. It certainly doesn’t feel dead to me. There are ways to get Facebook, Instagram and Twitter content into RSS too if that’s what you need.
    - stevenicr 7y ago
      I am interested in getting these three as rss feeds, not that I use them very much, much getting them into a reader would help others very much. a quick search shows some things saying public pages can be made RSS, but nothing like a bot that can suck in what your wall or whatever would be and push it into a feed that can be read otherwise. Here's to hoping the twitter open api thing and the few stories about portable data and standard export for social etc come true. Or maybe I need to dig deeper, but my gut feeling is/was - finding a way to pull these feeds would lead to the method being killed off by these walled gardens at some point so don't bother. I'd love to be wrong on this.
notadoc 7y ago
Apple News is yet another walled garden, it's not too surprising they'd remove the ability to customize your content experience beyond what they specifically approve, is it? Personally I still miss Google Reader and consider the demise of that service as one of the biggest losses to the open web.
- Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
  Feedly does all Google Reader did, and then something more. I don't miss Reader at all
bathtub365 7y ago
Has there been any confirmation that this isn’t just a bug? It wasn’t clear from the post.
- Gaelan 7y ago
  That was my reaction too. I'd expect that if it was intentional, they would have gotten rid of the URL handler.
  - bathtub365 7y ago
    Exactly, when Apple deprecates something they at least either communicate it properly or handle it elegantly (in my experience at least).
tschellenbach 7y ago
In case anyone wants to help: https://github.com/GetStream/Winds https://github.com/GetStream/Winds RSS support is going to keep on going downhill unless someone builds a more mainstream RSS experience. Most of the commercial options are focused on power users. So you have this negative cycle of sites dropping support, readers focusing on power users, regular users not using RSS -> continue the cycle.
moralestapia 7y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish. It's the 90s all over again.
- fennecfoxen 7y ago
  Yes, and Apple is the new Microsoft. (Microsoft, of course, is still the original Microsoft.)
  - stevehawk 7y ago
    You'd be hard pressed to convince me that Google is not the new Microsoft. Apple is very much the walled garden nightmare but as far as embrace, extend, extinguish, goes it seems like Google dominates that pretty hard.
    - kirykl 7y ago
      Google loves to acquire, stagnate, then extinguish.
purplezooey 7y ago
I wish companies would pay some attention to RSS. It's viewed as somehow less than important than social media. But it's the only solution of its kind.
- tadzik_ 7y ago
  It's empowering the users while providing minimal control for the content provider – no wonder for-profit companies avoid it like a plague.
jauke 7y ago
The comments on the quoted OSX Daily article suggest that News hasn’t supported RSS since at least 2017, so not sure why this is news now.
jbigelow76 7y ago
I'm not surprised to hear this considering what an out-of-gate unquestionable home run Apple News has been.I mean, it's been such monster success that Apple knows even its dumpster fire of a UX and god awful search functionality aren't enough to keep away the literal dozens of users it has. With no where else to turn for news the Apple faithful will just have to accept that Apple's decision to not support RSS really is the best decision for everyone one involved. I for one welcome this brave new RSS-less future!
- jauke 7y ago
  85 million monthly active users according to Apple.
  - londons_explore 7y ago
    85 million people too lazy to hunt out another news app, or just aimlessly opening apps on their phone when bored.
  - netfl0 7y ago
    Do you know what qualifies as ‘active’?
  - joegahona 7y ago
    I wonder if they’re defining “active users” as not only people who open the Apple News app, but also people who happen to see Apple News headlines in that Today View screen (the screen left of the home screen). I’m still using an SE so can’t be sure of this, but I’d bet all new iPhones still default to Apple News piping into that view: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-news-stories-in-today-view-iph1e466ebee/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-news-stories-in-...
swiley 7y ago
Mobile phone "platforms" are just thinly veiled attacks on users.
jauke 7y ago
The title doesn’t accurately reflect what’s going on here. Apple News hasn’t supported users adding their own feeds for a number of years. This article is about how publishers get their feeds into Apple News. Apple now requires publishers to provide a custom feed format rather than an RSS feed.
- joegahona 7y ago
  That's exactly how I read it. I cannot recall ever seeing Apple promoting non-ANF format, and publishers who used RSS instead of ANF were not permitted to get analytics on their product... so I guess it was just a matter of time.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
xtat 7y ago
What is apple news?
- grzm 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_News https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
leonixyz 7y ago
Why should they support it further if it cannot be used to track users?
ylluminate 7y ago
Apple News was dead before it started. A lot of actually worthwhile news sites and aggregators that we want/need don't even support RSS themselves anymore for various legal reasons.
- hazelnut 7y ago
  > various legal reasons Care to elaborate on this or share a link?
- alexander-litty 7y ago
  I thought RSS simply fell out of majority favor. Are there legal reasons behind it as well?
Yuioup 7y ago
Seriously people, Apple is a has-been. It's getting really sad now.
- zippergz 7y ago
  If you think RSS support has any bearing whatsoever on a company's success, I don't know what to tell you.....
  - Yuioup 7y ago
    Apple taking away features willy nilly in order to look cool is getting really sad.
mariopt 7y ago
It's curious this has only been spotted on HN now, I had to investigate a RSS bug in November and found this myself. This is apple "inviting" big magazines/newspapers into iOS or else.
ivoras 7y ago
That's sad, not that RSS was really viable since Google killed Reader, but nevertheless, one more sad blow to the idea of a decentralised web.
itsaride 7y ago
Even it’s own links no longer work : https://www.apple.com/rss/ https://www.apple.com/rss/
- ken 7y ago
  Looks fine to me.
Nas808 7y ago
That's a shame because I've been using it as a news aggregator while dodging all their offers to subscribe to News+ articles like the WSJ, etc.
navs 7y ago
I've yet to actually use Apple News. I don't understand why the News is not available in New Zealand to this day.
tbolt 7y ago
Apple makes many great products. Apple News is not one of them.

781 points by newscracker 7y ago

I just went through the comments discussing general frustration with the behaviour of Apple products. I think it is time to escape the walled garden of Apple Inc. by using, maintaining, creating or paying for the programs from the tree of FLOSS. Your opinion will be heard, and open standards adhered to as far as FLOSS is concerned. For those of you complain about lack of good hardware, there are some amazing hardware solutions like system76 for hardware that is made for GNU/Linux.

BinaryIdiot 7y ago
No phones, though. It's pretty much impossible (especially for the non-technical person) to use anything but iOS or Android and actually be able to do stuff other than calling people.
- mantap 7y ago
  Sounds good to me. I only use my phone for web browsing, chatting and taking pictures, plus a few easily replaceable commodity apps. The hardest thing to replace would be whatsapp since they really have us RestOfTheWorlders locked in good. The reason I stick to iOS is because Android is insufficiently focused on security and privacy, but if an OpenBSD of phones came along I'd happily use it.

spacemonkey92 7y ago

When I first created this app "7Web"(https://7web.co https://7web.co) couple of years back many suggested why don't I just use RSS feeds. Personally I'm not a big fan of RSS feeds mainly because I miss the familiarity and UX of the original website where I spend half the time browsing through Desktop and rest on mobile/iPad. I thought its just me but many of my users still use this app everyday.

matt_the_bass 7y ago

Funny this came up today. I was just trying to generate an RSS query from archive.org so that I could load a set of search results as a podcast on my phone. Every time I tried the archive.org advanced search RSS results, my iPhone kept redirecting to News app. Super annoying. I ended up just figuring out the syntax manually and typing it into a text editor before copy/pasting to Podcasts.

skinnyasianboi 7y ago

RSS feeds for the win. It keeps my feed clean and chronologically ordered.

Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

Now, this is why I'm worried about Apple's supposed Internet; it could just become Intranet.

kingludite 7y ago

I test RSS/Atom readers/aggregators with an OPML with at least 2000 entries in it. Most look pretty bad after that... they kinda all looked pretty b...baaad. (My own was never ready for normal use) My bias has it that Apple news doesn't sound good enough to try. It would be so cool if someone wrote a really good FOSS RSS Aggregator - honestly. It would make my day every day. I would also like a really good news group reader, a really good IRC client, a better mail client and a really good text/code editor. (etc) Shards of awesome are spread out over 10 000 applications.

lawrenceyan 7y ago

Ahh, the smell of monopoly in the air. Perhaps it's time to take a look at breaking up Apple? /s

newscracker 7y ago

Apple News was already flakey and unreliable in the sources (websites) it would allow to be added. With its highly limited geographical availability (years after launching) and its problematic focus on News+, I switched back to a plain RSS Reader to follow specific sites. Apple News seems like a niche product with hardly any technical effort put into it. In comparison, Google News, with its ads, generally looks like a more comprehensive choice for news. Not to mention it’s also “free” (of course, it never allowed, AFAIK, adding RSS feeds from any site).

Shivetya 7y ago
doesn't matter if it is half done or not as feature complete as other sites, it just is the default on an iPad so people like my parents end up using it because Apple makes sure to highlight it being added. so for those who did not consider looking for a source of news and one just appears it pretty much is a lock. the local newspaper (AJC) has their own app but its not great and worse when sending links they don't format to the device opening it; comics are the worst as half the frames are missing
iscrewyou 7y ago
Which RSS reader do you use?
- newscracker 7y ago
  I use Reeder 3 on iOS and NetNewsWire on Mac. NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader. An iOS version (also free) is coming in the first quarter of 2020.
- mhb 7y ago
  Not the OP, but https://bazqux.com/ https://bazqux.com/ is very nice.
  - asymmetric 7y ago
    Is there a self-hosted RSS reader that does feed de-summarization, like BazQux seems to do?

modmans2nd 7y ago

Flipboard is better than any news app I’ve used

skyyler 7y ago
I've never used it. Why do you like Flipboard? Why do you dislike other news apps? How much does it cost? If it's free, how do they monetise?
- modmans2nd 7y ago
  It’s free. You set up your likes and can mute news sources the. You can add RSS feeds you want to read as well. It lets you have the most control over your news feed than anyone else.
dcreemer 7y ago
and it supports RSS feeds -- paste the link into the search box

simonw 7y ago

The weirdest thing about this is that Apple News still hijacks links to Atom/RSS feeds - so if you click on one of those links in Mobile Safari you'll be bounced to the News app, which will then display an error. Here's a video I recorded of this behaviour: https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297 https://twitter.com/simonw/status/1210622908143415297 I think I'd rather they displayed a dump of ugly XML in the browser, just so I could copy and paste the URL into a feed reading app (I quite like Reeder for iOS and OSX these days).

Wowfunhappy 7y ago
Y'know, that makes me wonder... what if the "removal" of RSS support is just a bug?
- saagarjha 7y ago
  It is not.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    How do you know? I'm interested!
oefrha 7y ago
Safari on iOS 13 also got rid of the option to copy links of unsupported schemes, e.g. magnet. Now however you click you always get a link not supported message. Very frustrating. “Desktop class web browsing on the iPad”, except we’re getting rid of link copying. Ridiculous.
firloop 7y ago
For the link hijacking, it's worth noting that Apple News only exists/is pre-installed in a handful of markets and is uninstallable. But yeah, baffling.
- microcolonel 7y ago
  What if you want to use both Apple News and RSS feeds on one phone? I know it sounds crazy, I'm asking for a friend.

LeoPanthera 7y ago

Honestly I didn't even know that you could add RSS feeds to Apple News. But I already stopped using it, because no matter how often I thumbed-up real news, and thumbed-down clickbait and ads, the "front page" was always a frustrating mix of mostly clickbait and ads. I currently use the Google News app on my iPhone for "real" headline news, but I'm not super happy about it.

kevindong 7y ago
I personally blocked quite a few channels [0] on Apple News on my iPhone and the experience is a lot better now consequently. Despite what Apple says about their curation policies, the vast majority of content of the channels I blocked was pure junk/clickbait. [0]: In alphabetical order: 9to5Mac, BGR, Business Insider, BuzzFeed, Conde Nast Traveler, Cosmopolitan, Cult of mac, Electrek, FOOD & WINE, Forbes, iMangoss, Luxury Travel Diary, Mashable, NowThis, Page Six, People, Travel + Leisure
- jakebasile 7y ago
  I've blocked something like 50+ "sources" on Apple News, but more pop up every week or so. I refuse to believe they curate it at all.
  - reaperducer 7y ago
    Portions of Apple News are curated, not the entire thing.
reaperducer 7y ago
IME, the thumbs don't do anything. The only way to have a real affect on your news feed is to block channels. For example, I follow the Chicago Sun-Times. And every day Apple News shows me the Sun-Times horoscope. And every day I give it a thumb's down. Every. Single. Day. 400+ thumbs later, it still shows up every day.
- catalogia 7y ago

danso 7y ago

Not to minimize the concern over further erosion of RSS support, but I was surprised Apple News supported it at all. I follow a lot of media people on Twitter — a group who arguably is as still vocal (if not more) about Google Reader’s demise as tech people — and I can’t recall any of them mentioning using Apple News as an RSS reader (and just did a Twitter history search for “Apple news rss” to confirm my offhand guess). Was the functionality to add RSS buried or otherwise hindered? That said, I already long ago followed the author’s advice to “uninstall/remove Apple News”. The app experience was so terrible (at the time, at least) that I hated being sent to it when clicking tweeted links that were shared from Apple News.

tedunangst 7y ago
I may be mistaken, but I didn't think the news app ever supported arbitrary user specified feeds.

cpach 7y ago

If you want RSS on Macos, take a look at Netnewswire: https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/ https://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

bencollier49 7y ago
I'm surprised they've not banned that because it replicates the functionality of one of their apps, or something.
- koheripbal 7y ago
  Why would providing similar behavior to an OS app warrant a ban? Many many apps on various OSes supplement default OS apps.
  - CamperBob2 7y ago
    That's Apple for you. North Korea with stock options.
  - Wowfunhappy 7y ago
    This was in fact a policy very early in the iOS app store's history. Not for a long time though.
    - benologist 7y ago
      It's still in effect and the most recent example would be banning software monitoring usage after Apple replicated the functionality themselves. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/27/tech/apple-screen-time-app-store-banned-report/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/27/tech/apple-screen-time-ap...
      - pseudalopex 7y ago
        Apple replicated the functionality so they could crack down on third parties abusing enterprise device management.

kmfrk 7y ago

I remember trying to set up a site for Apple News three years ago, and as I updated my profile, RSS support disappeared. Apparently, it was a feature and not a bug. I abandoned Apple News pretty quickly as it became clear that it requires a dedicated person maintaining Apple News support.

Borog30 7y ago

Low

Borog30 7y ago

Hellow

api 7y ago

Just install a real RSS reader. There are many for every platform.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

superfist 7y ago

Not entirely related, but I want to mention that we have almost 2020 and Safari still doesn't support service workers push notifications (Push API). Shame on you Apple.

joering2 7y ago
This is how apple.com looks like on Safari (c) by Apple: https://ibb.co/ct6LTB0 https://ibb.co/ct6LTB0
- mikewhy 7y ago
  That's Safari for Windows. Safari for Windows was discontinued in 2012, almost 8 years ago.
- mffnbs 7y ago
  How well does the page render on a legacy version of IE running on a Mac?
npo9 7y ago
Maybe I’m old school, but I don’t want push notifications from my web browser.
- phailhaus 7y ago
  That's fine, you can just not subscribe. But other people do want push notifications, like for emails.
  - sangnoir 7y ago
    Also, notifications can be used to replace emails. Instead of being sent an email from a forum when someone replies to my comment (with a link) - I'd rather have the browser do that (with my permission).
- superfist 7y ago
  It's quite important/basic feature required in most PWA use cases. Such feature will result in number of apps shiped outside App Store. This is probably why they delay it.

mastrsushi 7y ago

More people spend time worrying about the decline of RSS than the amount of people actually using RSS.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Well, I discovered this topic via RSS in Feedly. Pretty lively dead standard!
themagician 7y ago
The decline of RSS has ruined the internet for me. I’m not being hyperbolic either. RSS effectively died and has been replaced with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds. Even if RSS still technical exists for some content, it’s not the same. What was great about RSS is it was pure. If content creators and publishers wanted to put ads in the feed they could and you knew you were directly supporting them. We didn’t have this stupid “likes” garbage that people were competing for. I find myself just consuming a lot less content on the internet. I’d rather just not participate than have to wade through the bullshit that’s become “social media.”
- jauke 7y ago
  I consume most content via RSS. It certainly doesn’t feel dead to me. There are ways to get Facebook, Instagram and Twitter content into RSS too if that’s what you need.
  - stevenicr 7y ago
    I am interested in getting these three as rss feeds, not that I use them very much, much getting them into a reader would help others very much. a quick search shows some things saying public pages can be made RSS, but nothing like a bot that can suck in what your wall or whatever would be and push it into a feed that can be read otherwise. Here's to hoping the twitter open api thing and the few stories about portable data and standard export for social etc come true. Or maybe I need to dig deeper, but my gut feeling is/was - finding a way to pull these feeds would lead to the method being killed off by these walled gardens at some point so don't bother. I'd love to be wrong on this.

notadoc 7y ago

Apple News is yet another walled garden, it's not too surprising they'd remove the ability to customize your content experience beyond what they specifically approve, is it? Personally I still miss Google Reader and consider the demise of that service as one of the biggest losses to the open web.

Andrew_nenakhov 7y ago
Feedly does all Google Reader did, and then something more. I don't miss Reader at all

bathtub365 7y ago

Has there been any confirmation that this isn’t just a bug? It wasn’t clear from the post.

Gaelan 7y ago
That was my reaction too. I'd expect that if it was intentional, they would have gotten rid of the URL handler.
- bathtub365 7y ago
  Exactly, when Apple deprecates something they at least either communicate it properly or handle it elegantly (in my experience at least).

tschellenbach 7y ago

In case anyone wants to help: https://github.com/GetStream/Winds https://github.com/GetStream/Winds RSS support is going to keep on going downhill unless someone builds a more mainstream RSS experience. Most of the commercial options are focused on power users. So you have this negative cycle of sites dropping support, readers focusing on power users, regular users not using RSS -> continue the cycle.

moralestapia 7y ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish. It's the 90s all over again.

fennecfoxen 7y ago
Yes, and Apple is the new Microsoft. (Microsoft, of course, is still the original Microsoft.)
- stevehawk 7y ago
  You'd be hard pressed to convince me that Google is not the new Microsoft. Apple is very much the walled garden nightmare but as far as embrace, extend, extinguish, goes it seems like Google dominates that pretty hard.
  - kirykl 7y ago
    Google loves to acquire, stagnate, then extinguish.

purplezooey 7y ago

I wish companies would pay some attention to RSS. It's viewed as somehow less than important than social media. But it's the only solution of its kind.

tadzik_ 7y ago
It's empowering the users while providing minimal control for the content provider – no wonder for-profit companies avoid it like a plague.

jauke 7y ago

The comments on the quoted OSX Daily article suggest that News hasn’t supported RSS since at least 2017, so not sure why this is news now.

jbigelow76 7y ago

I'm not surprised to hear this considering what an out-of-gate unquestionable home run Apple News has been.I mean, it's been such monster success that Apple knows even its dumpster fire of a UX and god awful search functionality aren't enough to keep away the literal dozens of users it has. With no where else to turn for news the Apple faithful will just have to accept that Apple's decision to not support RSS really is the best decision for everyone one involved. I for one welcome this brave new RSS-less future!

jauke 7y ago
85 million monthly active users according to Apple.
- londons_explore 7y ago
  85 million people too lazy to hunt out another news app, or just aimlessly opening apps on their phone when bored.
- netfl0 7y ago
  Do you know what qualifies as ‘active’?
- joegahona 7y ago
  I wonder if they’re defining “active users” as not only people who open the Apple News app, but also people who happen to see Apple News headlines in that Today View screen (the screen left of the home screen). I’m still using an SE so can’t be sure of this, but I’d bet all new iPhones still default to Apple News piping into that view: https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-news-stories-in-today-view-iph1e466ebee/ios https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/view-news-stories-in-...

swiley 7y ago

Mobile phone "platforms" are just thinly veiled attacks on users.

jauke 7y ago

The title doesn’t accurately reflect what’s going on here. Apple News hasn’t supported users adding their own feeds for a number of years. This article is about how publishers get their feeds into Apple News. Apple now requires publishers to provide a custom feed format rather than an RSS feed.

joegahona 7y ago
That's exactly how I read it. I cannot recall ever seeing Apple promoting non-ANF format, and publishers who used RSS instead of ANF were not permitted to get analytics on their product... so I guess it was just a matter of time.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

xtat 7y ago

What is apple news?

grzm 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_News https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_News https://www.apple.com/apple-news/ https://www.apple.com/apple-news/

leonixyz 7y ago

Why should they support it further if it cannot be used to track users?

ylluminate 7y ago

Apple News was dead before it started. A lot of actually worthwhile news sites and aggregators that we want/need don't even support RSS themselves anymore for various legal reasons.

hazelnut 7y ago
> various legal reasons Care to elaborate on this or share a link?
alexander-litty 7y ago
I thought RSS simply fell out of majority favor. Are there legal reasons behind it as well?

Yuioup 7y ago

Seriously people, Apple is a has-been. It's getting really sad now.

zippergz 7y ago
If you think RSS support has any bearing whatsoever on a company's success, I don't know what to tell you.....
- Yuioup 7y ago
  Apple taking away features willy nilly in order to look cool is getting really sad.

mariopt 7y ago

It's curious this has only been spotted on HN now, I had to investigate a RSS bug in November and found this myself. This is apple "inviting" big magazines/newspapers into iOS or else.

ivoras 7y ago

That's sad, not that RSS was really viable since Google killed Reader, but nevertheless, one more sad blow to the idea of a decentralised web.

itsaride 7y ago

Even it’s own links no longer work : https://www.apple.com/rss/ https://www.apple.com/rss/

ken 7y ago
Looks fine to me.

Nas808 7y ago

That's a shame because I've been using it as a news aggregator while dodging all their offers to subscribe to News+ articles like the WSJ, etc.

navs 7y ago

I've yet to actually use Apple News. I don't understand why the News is not available in New Zealand to this day.

tbolt 7y ago

Apple makes many great products. Apple News is not one of them.