8 ms·

Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre serv

Apple News and News+ represent everything wrong with modern Apple: a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. It is their most mediocre service, jarringly jamming cheap clickbait next to serious journalism in a layout that makes no sense. The technical execution is just as lazy. While some magazines are tailored, many are just flat, low-res PDFs that look terrible on the high-end Retina screens Apple sells. Worst of all, Apple had the leverage to revolutionize a struggling industry; instead, they settled for a half-baked aggregator. It’s a toxic mix of Apple tropes that simply weren't thought through. The ads are the cherry on the cake.

robmccoll 8mo ago
They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.
JKCalhoun 8mo ago
I ignore Apple News these days. I had high hopes when Apple bought the company that eventually became their News app. Alas… Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".
- givinguflac 8mo ago
  You can definitely block ads- try NextDNS.
  - mikestew 8mo ago
    I’ve tried blocking the ads with a pi-hole, to no avail. I suspect the ads come from the same servers that the articles do. I can’t find obvious ad servers in the query logs. If anyone has a hint on blocking Apple News ads at DNS, I’d love to hear it.
    - skygazer 8mo ago
      1Blocker, with their in-app tracker blocking turned on, will block Apple News ads on iOS/iPadOS and will also block ads in Google News and free to play games. I guess you can’t block tracking without also blocking the ads. It installs a local VPN profile that blocks connections to hosts typically blocked with dns based ad blockers. They’ve increasingly hidden the feature in the app, for some reason.
      - maxkfranz 8mo ago
        How is it on battery life to run the VPN continuously?
        skygazer 8mo ago
        I haven’t noticed it consume any additional battery. It doesn’t actually connect to a vpn server, or reencrypt traffic. It’s just a hack to deny select connections. I often do end up turning it off after a few days, though, because some times I need tracking redirects to work, and I’m too lazy to always whitelist.
    - int_19h 8mo ago
      I'm using AdGuard running in Home Assistant and I don't see any ads in Apple News. Looking at what gets blocked when I open the News apps, try going for these domains: news.iadsdk.apple.com news-app-events.apple.com news-sports-events.apple.com news-events.apple.com
- lotsofpulp 8mo ago
  90% of the content in the News+ app is itself an ad.
ksec 8mo ago
Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its "customers". I use the word "customer" here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user. But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant. You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad. Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.
- jangxx 8mo ago
  I actually like Fitness+, it got me working out for the first time in my life.
- addicted 8mo ago
  "customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better. "user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using. It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
  - swores 8mo ago
    > "It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create." You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use"). People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not. Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free. People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.
nntwozz 8mo ago
At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple? I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint. It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook. SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after. Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined. It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_University
- kranke155 8mo ago
  Yes on the last count for Apple U. The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences. People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
- jorvi 8mo ago
  Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are: - Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products - His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation. He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it. As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet. Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days. To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.
vachina 8mo ago
It's not a revenue generating service.
PaulHoule 8mo ago
I looked a lot into the "universal paywall" business model where one subscription buys you access to articles from a wide range of news outlets. It's close to impossible to execute because the most prestigious outlets (ahem... The New York Times) won't give you the time of the day, even if you are startup royalty. That Apple has accomplished anything in this space is remarkable.
mgh2 8mo ago
Why can't they build their own ad network for control instead of partnering with 3rd parties?
- vel0city 8mo ago
  Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network. https://ads.apple.com/ https://ads.apple.com/
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
giancarlostoro 8mo ago
Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie). Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.
- afavour 8mo ago
  A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.
  - giancarlostoro 8mo ago
    Agree I am just comparing Apples efforts
  - philistine 8mo ago
    They don't create the Apple TV shows either; they buy those. Pluribus is a Sony production.
basch 8mo ago
For Apple to really win this space I believe they would need to release a cross platform Publisher tool and complete in the AMP space. Some kind of magazine design / web design software that publishes articles to a standard format and applies a layout over the top. Then the News app becomes a renderer/aggregator that does things better than the standard web browser.
afavour 8mo ago
In fairness Apple did come up with a custom JSON format for articles: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow. They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers. I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.
- kyralis 8mo ago
  It's definitely that publishers don't want it. This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.
  - wnc3141 8mo ago
    I can't imagine it's a great deal for publishers. It's probably why NYT, Economist and other prestige publications aren't on it. (Save for Atlantic, New Yorker). I. Assuming they use the Spotify model ( paying commissions on articles per reader)?
  - derefr 8mo ago
    I wonder why they don't just prioritize the ~500 most popular of those content providers that are feeding them sludge articles, and write (AI-generate, even) logic to manually parse and transform said sludge into their format? It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.
naravara 8mo ago
Apple News unironically would have been better if they had just made an RSS reader with a way to subscription gate feeds and a rule that you have to do provide the full text of the article. They could have just put their energy into just polishing up a known and weathered and broadly adopted technology but nooooo, they needed something with platform lock-in so they could book more “services revenue.” They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.
icapybara 8mo ago
FYI it would be "Icing on the cake" or "cherry on top"
el_benhameen 8mo ago
I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles. Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”. And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off. Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.
- kccqzy 8mo ago
  Remembering state is a giant oversight on many apps for content consumption, Apple News included. I sometimes read long articles on Apple News. I could be interrupted by a call or some messages. When I return to Apple News, it displays my half-finished article for a split second and returns to the home screen. This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.
m463 8mo ago
> a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. I think I agree. They have a broad selection of apps... that all end up being shallow. Every once in a while there are decent things hidden though - I like apple translate. I also like adding "copy text from a graphical image" to the OS.
no_wizard 8mo ago
News is ham-fisted as much by news organizations themselves as much as it is Apple. They don't want to sell through the News+ subscriptions, they want to tease a few articles and then upsell you to their subscription. News organizations have really become quite aggressive about negotiating these things now, I think in large part because Meta (aka Facebook at the time) screwed them badly when it stopped revenue sharing. This leads to a situation where a product that actually could at least be good and serviceable is a mess. They don't see News+ as being a positive to their businesses to bundle it into the subscription. edit: I'm open to hearing others on this. I am only pointing out both Apple and the publishers are at fault for varying aspects of why Apple News+ ends up being a mediocre product
- Dylan16807 8mo ago
  That seems really short-sighted. A fair share of more than $100/year is a lot of money for news.
- mavhc 8mo ago
  Every news organisation thinks they're the one you want to read, they want you to be a loyal customer to them and not read other newspapers. Google News used to have "see 349 other articles on this story" which really showed how pointless news organisations were, constantly rewriting/licencing other people's content. Any news aggregator platform is only used by news organisations under duress.
khana 8mo ago
[dead]
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
abhagvasur 8mo ago
[dead]
__natty__ 8mo ago
At first minimalistic ui was because of UX. Today apple design managers went to the UI side forgetting about end user.
projektfu 8mo ago
Does Apple News still share Apple News links to articles instead of the canonical link? When I had an iPhone, I uninstalled/disabled Apple News because I don't like distractions but when people shared with me an Apple News link I couldn't open it, because it would go to the app store instead of a redirect for the article. Ironically, on Android, that wasn't a problem. I'd get the article.
- SkipperCat 8mo ago
  When I click on links in Apple News, it stays in the Apple News app. That's the same on my phone, iPad and MacBook.
  - projektfu 8mo ago
    And if you share an article to your favorite messenger?
    - SkipperCat 8mo ago
      I only share articles between my wife and myself. The shared articles show up in our respective Apple News apps. Never really shared an article outside of the ecosystem. Sorry that's not more helpful.
- int_19h 8mo ago
  Yes, it still wraps them into https://apple.news https://apple.news links. However when one such is opened in the browser, it - like any other app link - asks if you want to open it in the news app. And if you close that popup and click on "tap here", you get the link to the original article.
insane_dreamer 8mo ago
I use it daily and it's decent. It's easy enough to just filter out all of the low-quality news sources (either block those channels or "suggest less"). I use it for sources I want to occasionally read articles from but wouldn't subscribe to: WSJ, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Scientific American, or sources I do subscribe to but it's convenient to have them in one place (Atlantic, Wired, my local paper) instead of 5 different apps. I mostly ignore the "For You" and go straight to browsing the sources I like, "saving" articles to read later, etc. Never noticed there were lots of ads; I guess I'm used to just scrolling on by them automatically.

robmccoll 8mo ago

They also bought and killed texture, a fantastic cross-platform magazine subscription service, to somehow further Apple News. I subscribed to Texture on Android. I wouldn't give a dollar to Apple News even if I was in the Apple ecosystem.

JKCalhoun 8mo ago

I ignore Apple News these days. I had high hopes when Apple bought the company that eventually became their News app. Alas… Of course I hate that I can't block ads, but at the same time, I wonder if the unblockable ads are not, in fact, a help for that "struggling industry".

givinguflac 8mo ago
You can definitely block ads- try NextDNS.
- mikestew 8mo ago
  I’ve tried blocking the ads with a pi-hole, to no avail. I suspect the ads come from the same servers that the articles do. I can’t find obvious ad servers in the query logs. If anyone has a hint on blocking Apple News ads at DNS, I’d love to hear it.
  - skygazer 8mo ago
    1Blocker, with their in-app tracker blocking turned on, will block Apple News ads on iOS/iPadOS and will also block ads in Google News and free to play games. I guess you can’t block tracking without also blocking the ads. It installs a local VPN profile that blocks connections to hosts typically blocked with dns based ad blockers. They’ve increasingly hidden the feature in the app, for some reason.
    - maxkfranz 8mo ago
      How is it on battery life to run the VPN continuously?
      - skygazer 8mo ago
        I haven’t noticed it consume any additional battery. It doesn’t actually connect to a vpn server, or reencrypt traffic. It’s just a hack to deny select connections. I often do end up turning it off after a few days, though, because some times I need tracking redirects to work, and I’m too lazy to always whitelist.
  - int_19h 8mo ago
    I'm using AdGuard running in Home Assistant and I don't see any ads in Apple News. Looking at what gets blocked when I open the News apps, try going for these domains: news.iadsdk.apple.com news-app-events.apple.com news-sports-events.apple.com news-events.apple.com
lotsofpulp 8mo ago
90% of the content in the News+ app is itself an ad.

ksec 8mo ago

Ever since Apple moved to Services Strategy in 2014 it has been like this. Services were not there so they could provide a better experience for its "customers". I use the word "customer" here which is what Apple / Steve Jobs used to call their loyal fans, and not user. But to further growth their Revenue pie because they foresee iPhone one day will stagnant. You now have Apple Fitness+, Apple TV, News, Music, Arcade. None of these are of any quality of what Apple used to be. It is really sad. Oh and the most iconic thing? Apple was the one who tried to kill internet ads between 2017 - 2020.

jangxx 8mo ago
I actually like Fitness+, it got me working out for the first time in my life.
addicted 8mo ago
"customer" is a much better term IMO. It indicates this is ultimately a transactional relationship where both sides have certain responsibilities. The customer the responsibility to provide the money, and the provider receiving the money has a responsibility to provide the customer with something, products or services, of value that makes their lives better. "user" is a worse term. It suggests that the "user" is simply utilizing the provider's products/services, and therefore they can't really complain about whatever the provider chooses to do in return, because the "user" can simply stop using. It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create.
- swores 8mo ago
  > "It's also not a coincidence, IMO, that drug addicts are also called "users" since "user" implies a one way dependent relationship and that's what all the tech companies have been trying to create." You're drawing a connection that's not there. It's indeed not a coincidence, but just because both situations fit the definition of the word "user" (and "to use"). People use drugs, whether they're addicted or whether they're taking a one-off dose given to them by a doctor. They are a customer in that situation if they're buying the drug from somebody (illegal dealer, pharmacy), but they're a user whether they paid or not. Likewise, someone is a customer if Apple's if they paid for, or are expected to pay in the future, a device or service. But they're a user regardless of whether they're using a phone they bought, or a service that's being provided for free. People can use services provided by charities, they can use skis on a mountain... there's absolutely no negative connotation to its general definition, it just happens that some things people use are bad and some are good.

nntwozz 8mo ago

At what point did the old Apple cross the threshold to "modern" Apple? I agree with your point I just find the distinction hard to pinpoint. It's like the (incorrect) analogy of the boiled frog, I know it's a cliché but I really feel things started downhill in overall quality and wow factor with the advent of Tim Cook. SJ had failures like Ping and MobileMe, but they seemed to pick up on the criticism back then and execute correctly quickly after. Now because of the penny-pinching and success of Apple nobody makes a big deal out of anything, the momentum is so strong that stuff like liquid glass can come through unpolished/unfinished/unrefined. It seems to me that Apple University failed its mission completely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_University https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_University

kranke155 8mo ago
Yes on the last count for Apple U. The culture of excellence is just not there. Big company but not sure if it’s a live player atm. Lots of unrefined experiences. People say it’s Tim Cook as if Apple had a bunch of CEOs. In its modern incarnation it was basically Jobs and Cook. But there were some major improvements under Cook and some major disappointments. Hardware seems to be doing well, software not so much.
jorvi 8mo ago
Steve Jobs was all about the customer experience, hence so many of his famous quotes. Two like the most are: - Him saying "Microsoft has no style", not because I care about ribbing on Microsoft but because it indicated that Apple was a company that really cared about the aesthetics of both their hardware and software products - His response to the question why there was no $600 MacBook to compete with Windows plastic craptops. He specifically said that to deliver a good UX to the users, he needed Macs at a certain price point to invest in the hardware and the OS. Shareholder value didn't even enter the equation. He also hated market segmentation and was adamant that all iPhones within a generation had the same features, aside from the storage size. When the 6 Plus models got image stabilization he felt awkward about it. As soon as Tim Cook took over, it became beancounter city. Market segmentation became massive. Year over year price hikes with minimal improvements. Services became the core strategy. And the last 5 years you are under a constant barrage of ads for iCloud, Apple Music, Apple News, Apple TV and even ads in your Wallet. Oh, and I'm just remember how Jobs said that form should follow function. Which you can also see a clear decline in from when Jobs became less involved, with iOS 7 being a disaster. And ever since then Apple has being violating their own Human Interface Guidelines. If you download their 1997 version it's absurd how many of their own former guidelines they violate these days. To be honest, I'm not sure if you can entirely blame Cook. Ever since the 2010s, it's felt like capitalism has reached an endstage culture, where it is no longer about an equilibrium between best product for lowest price vs minimum product for highest price, but instead just maximizing shareholder value at the cost of the customer, the workers, the business itself, the environment and what have you.

vachina 8mo ago

It's not a revenue generating service.

PaulHoule 8mo ago

I looked a lot into the "universal paywall" business model where one subscription buys you access to articles from a wide range of news outlets. It's close to impossible to execute because the most prestigious outlets (ahem... The New York Times) won't give you the time of the day, even if you are startup royalty. That Apple has accomplished anything in this space is remarkable.

mgh2 8mo ago

Why can't they build their own ad network for control instead of partnering with 3rd parties?

vel0city 8mo ago
Apple does have their own ad network. This is their ad network. https://ads.apple.com/ https://ads.apple.com/

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

giancarlostoro 8mo ago

Contrast with Apple TV+ which has insanely high quality shows. I feel like they arent advertising it enough and investing in it enough. One of my favorite shows that my daughter watches is on Apple TV+ the other on Amazon (If You Give a Mouse a Cookie). Apple is really messing up in my eyes they have so much potential they are throwing away.

afavour 8mo ago
A clear difference here is that Apple creates the TV+ shows and they don't create the News+ content. And I really don't think they want to get into the news content creation business.
- giancarlostoro 8mo ago
  Agree I am just comparing Apples efforts
- philistine 8mo ago
  They don't create the Apple TV shows either; they buy those. Pluribus is a Sony production.

basch 8mo ago

For Apple to really win this space I believe they would need to release a cross platform Publisher tool and complete in the AMP space. Some kind of magazine design / web design software that publishes articles to a standard format and applies a layout over the top. Then the News app becomes a renderer/aggregator that does things better than the standard web browser.

afavour 8mo ago

In fairness Apple did come up with a custom JSON format for articles: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat https://developer.apple.com/documentation/applenewsformat The problem is that people don't use it. I imagine it's a chicken/egg thing, the audience on News isn't big so it isn't worth the publishers time catering to an entirely new format, the News experience is crappy so the audience doesn't grow. They could have insisted that everyone use their format but I suspect publishers would just refuse. It's not exactly in a publishers interest to help boost a middleman between their content and readers. I'd be really interested to see what Apple's approach would be if they used more web technologies (since that's what publishers are using today anyway). Even just a webview with disabled JavaScript would get a ton of the way there in terms of performance. They have WebKit engineers in house that could probably tweak it even further.

kyralis 8mo ago
It's definitely that publishers don't want it. This is actually the trajectory of both Apple News and iAd before it, which is what started out providing the ad service for Apple News. Apple would like to do a high quality solution, and then keeps relaxing their standards when there's not enough buy-in from the content providers. They were forced to allow the non-curated news formats to have sufficient content.
- wnc3141 8mo ago
  I can't imagine it's a great deal for publishers. It's probably why NYT, Economist and other prestige publications aren't on it. (Save for Atlantic, New Yorker). I. Assuming they use the Spotify model ( paying commissions on articles per reader)?
- derefr 8mo ago
  I wonder why they don't just prioritize the ~500 most popular of those content providers that are feeding them sludge articles, and write (AI-generate, even) logic to manually parse and transform said sludge into their format? It'd be a big one-time lift; and of course there'd be annoying constant breakage to fix as sites update; but News.app could always fall back to rendering the original article URL if the News backend service's currently-deployed parser-transformer for a given site failed on the given article. It's make things no worse and often better than they are today.

naravara 8mo ago

Apple News unironically would have been better if they had just made an RSS reader with a way to subscription gate feeds and a rule that you have to do provide the full text of the article. They could have just put their energy into just polishing up a known and weathered and broadly adopted technology but nooooo, they needed something with platform lock-in so they could book more “services revenue.” They didn’t need to do like half the work they did, and a lot of what they did do in order to make the news feeds prettier are seldom adopted because Apple doesn’t want to do the hard partnership work to drive and support it.

icapybara 8mo ago

FYI it would be "Icing on the cake" or "cherry on top"

el_benhameen 8mo ago

I like using it to listen to narrated versions of New Yorker articles. Except I can’t tell it “I like narrated versions of New Yorker articles”. I can search by publisher, or I can browse narrated stories that are selected “for you” (none of which are of interest to me), but I can’t just search for “narrated stories AND New Yorker”. And when I do finally find one, if I don’t finish in one session, there is zero context from the previous session when I return to the app—it has forgotten that I ever started listening to the story. I then need to go through the process of finding it again and trying to remember where I left off. Yet another Apple app designed by idealists and tested and refined by nobody who actually uses the app.

kccqzy 8mo ago
Remembering state is a giant oversight on many apps for content consumption, Apple News included. I sometimes read long articles on Apple News. I could be interrupted by a call or some messages. When I return to Apple News, it displays my half-finished article for a split second and returns to the home screen. This is worse than using reading news on a browser. Browsers either don’t kill your tabs on its own (desktop browsers) or at least try to remember your scroll position. Even if it fails at doing that, it at least has a history feature. Apple News just makes your half-read articles disappear into the void.

m463 8mo ago

> a ham-fisted approach to simplicity that ignores the end user. I think I agree. They have a broad selection of apps... that all end up being shallow. Every once in a while there are decent things hidden though - I like apple translate. I also like adding "copy text from a graphical image" to the OS.

no_wizard 8mo ago

News is ham-fisted as much by news organizations themselves as much as it is Apple. They don't want to sell through the News+ subscriptions, they want to tease a few articles and then upsell you to their subscription. News organizations have really become quite aggressive about negotiating these things now, I think in large part because Meta (aka Facebook at the time) screwed them badly when it stopped revenue sharing. This leads to a situation where a product that actually could at least be good and serviceable is a mess. They don't see News+ as being a positive to their businesses to bundle it into the subscription. edit: I'm open to hearing others on this. I am only pointing out both Apple and the publishers are at fault for varying aspects of why Apple News+ ends up being a mediocre product

Dylan16807 8mo ago
That seems really short-sighted. A fair share of more than $100/year is a lot of money for news.
mavhc 8mo ago
Every news organisation thinks they're the one you want to read, they want you to be a loyal customer to them and not read other newspapers. Google News used to have "see 349 other articles on this story" which really showed how pointless news organisations were, constantly rewriting/licencing other people's content. Any news aggregator platform is only used by news organisations under duress.

khana 8mo ago

[dead]

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

abhagvasur 8mo ago

[dead]

__natty__ 8mo ago

At first minimalistic ui was because of UX. Today apple design managers went to the UI side forgetting about end user.

projektfu 8mo ago

Does Apple News still share Apple News links to articles instead of the canonical link? When I had an iPhone, I uninstalled/disabled Apple News because I don't like distractions but when people shared with me an Apple News link I couldn't open it, because it would go to the app store instead of a redirect for the article. Ironically, on Android, that wasn't a problem. I'd get the article.

SkipperCat 8mo ago
When I click on links in Apple News, it stays in the Apple News app. That's the same on my phone, iPad and MacBook.
- projektfu 8mo ago
  And if you share an article to your favorite messenger?
  - SkipperCat 8mo ago
    I only share articles between my wife and myself. The shared articles show up in our respective Apple News apps. Never really shared an article outside of the ecosystem. Sorry that's not more helpful.
int_19h 8mo ago
Yes, it still wraps them into https://apple.news https://apple.news links. However when one such is opened in the browser, it - like any other app link - asks if you want to open it in the news app. And if you close that popup and click on "tap here", you get the link to the original article.

insane_dreamer 8mo ago

I use it daily and it's decent. It's easy enough to just filter out all of the low-quality news sources (either block those channels or "suggest less"). I use it for sources I want to occasionally read articles from but wouldn't subscribe to: WSJ, New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Scientific American, or sources I do subscribe to but it's convenient to have them in one place (Atlantic, Wired, my local paper) instead of 5 different apps. I mostly ignore the "For You" and go straight to browsing the sources I like, "saving" articles to read later, etc. Never noticed there were lots of ads; I guess I'm used to just scrolling on by them automatically.