Hacker News Reader

Comment by boardwaalk | Hacker News Reader

Speaking generally about Google News, it's amazing that Apple of all companies has leap frogged Google News with Apple News in terms of customization on top of curation.

It's infuriating when a redesign has half the functionality of the original. It's not like it was feature-rich in the first place!

It's silly not being able to remove entertainment (aka celebrity gossip) or sports (even if I was a sport fan, I probably wouldn't care about every sport -- why can't I filter to MotoGP or what have you?) and having science be mostly several times regurgitated pop-sci and health be mostly fearing mongering nonsense.

I also regularly notice failures where articles they group together are almost entirely unrelated.

In the end, I still do RSS (although support in certain areas of interest are pretty weak) and Twitter (in a read-only fashion) and go to Google News over Apple News only by habit.

View on HN

I’ve looked at Apple News, and while its sources can be customized to some extent, the app is not yet available in all regions (though it’s been around for more than a couple of years). IIRC, it’s coming to Canada shortly. It also doesn’t allow one to follow sites that Apple doesn’t know about or care about, and if you change the region setting on the device, you’re no longer allowed to follow certain channels (even those that are not region specific or are smaller/individual sites).

Apple is excruciatingly slow on this and a few other things, whereas Google News, for all its faults, is available in many countries and regions.

This is where, and why, RSS becomes a better option.

One thing that surprised me about the news app is that it gives you desktop notifications for the sources you follow. I can't think of a more useless distraction than getting notifications for news.

It has no real preference pane for managing notifications afaict, so I had to unfollow everything to shut it up. And that was the last time I opened the app.

Apple News is broken in a crazier way, you need to own an iOS device to see it. I mean, what the hell?

It's on macOS as well.

These are basically the main downside though - I switched to Apple News after Google started inserting YouTube videos in Google News, and haven't looked back. AMP also broke the browser back button as well, adding insult on top of injury.

That's just Google's philosophy of UI design, especially of Search. Tiny frontend (i.e. little controls), gigantic backend (that guesses what you haven't or even couldn't select). Works for >95% of population, probably >99%.

> why can't I filter to MotoGP or what have you?

I find Google actually does a good job at curating the news for me once I've told it what my interests were. Additionally, it seems to automatically pick up my new interests automatically - for instance I get news updates on the television shows I like, for sports - it's pretty much all the teams and sports I follow. Sometimes if I'm researching a topic, I'll start getting news on those topics as well...sometimes months later even if something newsworthy happened. Whether it's getting that from search or google analytics..I'm really not sure but I can tell you I really enjoy it.

I agree. Google does an excellent job of curating cricket (my guess this is mostly from their India office), every time I search for scores, fixtures or news, all the data is displayed correctly. They also have the Google calendar, so I get notified of upcoming games.

Interesting, I stopped using Apple News awhile ago, mainly because source customization didn't seem to work well. Maybe I should give it a shot again.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com