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IMO, Apple News is still a hobby looking for a purpose, since it was launched close to five years ago and is still available in only a few countries. Forget abo
by wtmt 6y ago
IMO, Apple News is still a hobby looking for a purpose, since it was launched close to five years ago and is still available in only a few countries. Forget about the Apple News+ subscription, even the app isn’t available in other countries (you can get around this by setting the region of your device to one of the supported ones). It doesn’t look like Apple devotes much effort to keep it afloat or widen its reach.
What’s even worse is that the Apple News app could allow adding RSS feeds from sites, but it doesn’t recognize RSS officially but will use it internally for sites in Apple’s whitelist. If it allowed adding any random feed, it could potentially be my go to app for news.
Contrast that to Google News — which is predicated on collecting information and showing ads (edit: Google News doesn’t insert ads into news sources, as pointed by gundmc in a reply) — that’s widely available. In Google News, you can get a link of the original article to share with others (and with perhaps an additional step in some cases, avoid tracking of where from and how the link came). In Apple News, sharing a link gives you a cryptic Apple News domain link, which tracks all clicks. I trust Apple more on privacy than I trust Google, but this is one of those annoying things.
I’m sure Apple isn’t trying to beat Google on this front. Apple is just hoping to get paying subscribers while retaining a huge cut of the revenues.
- ksec 6y ago>Apple News is still a hobby looking for a purpose Yes and they are still burning money into it. Apple Music, nearly 5 years after its launch and despite its home advantage is still lacking behind Spotify. Thinking of the same to Apple TV+. And likely the same to Apple Arcade. Apple Music has been making some inroads after Iovine is out. But Streaming business wasn't ever going to make much money anyway. Oh and I forgot, Apple Cash, Apple Wallet... and lots of other things Apple seemingly has forgotten about.
- OkGoDoIt 6y agoAs far as I can tell setting the region doesn’t really work. Even on my USA iPhone with USA region, when I travel internationally the Apple news app refuses to load. Even the widget refuses to load. All based on my current physical location. It’s infuriating. And to be clear, I’m just talking about free news content, no subscriptions, nothing you couldn’t get easily by going to the actual website, so any paid licensing geo restrictions shouldn’t really be relevant.
- wtmt 6y agoI don’t know what’s happening in your case, but changing the region works for me even in locations where the Apple News app isn’t available. Are you also using a non-USA store account when you travel? That can really confuse Apple News.
- lil1t 6y agoI'm using USA region without actually being there and non-USA store account. Something like a few months ago Apple News didn't load for me neither no matter what country VPN was set to. But now that I tried it again, it actually works just fine on iPadOS 13.4.1 correctly loading the USA stories based solely on the region settings.
- gundmc 6y ago> Contrast that to Google News — which is predicated on collecting information and showing ads Google News doesn't show ads.
- wtmt 6y agoThanks. I was still in the edit window and have corrected it.
- codeisawesome 6y agoChanging region didn’t work to get Apple News :(