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Comment by corin_ | Hacker News Reader

I can't comment on the quality of the application, because for some reason that I can't understand it doesn't seem to be available for non-US iPad owners. Well, not in the UK at any rate.

Ah well, I guess I'll get by with The Times, Guardian, Telegraph, NY Times, LA Times, FT, WSJ, Int Herald Tribune and La Monde.

(And from the reviews I've heard, seems the content is fairly shoddy anyway, guess I'm not missing much.)

edit: I haven't yet had time myself to bother reading anything, but for anyone who does want to read the content without downloading the iPad app, check out http://thedailyindexed.tumblr.com/ which links to all the day's articles, as they are available on The Daily's website.

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>I can't comment on the quality of the application, because for some reason that I can't understand it doesn't seem to be available for non-US iPad owners. Well, not in the UK at any rate.

It's coming to the UK "soon" according to @daily.

Content seems to be pretty heavily US-focused, and as it seems to be (at least in large part) a gossip rag, it was decided against shipping US gossip to rest-of-world customers.

That doesn’t make any sense, does it?

They don’t have to market it, why not just make it available everywhere? I’m not in principle opposed to the App Store but this is one of those stupid things about it. The cool thing about the web is that by default, everything is available everywhere and it is hard and not foolproof to make something not available everywhere. I can read nytimes.com in Germany despite clearly not being part of the New York Time’s target group.

What reason could there possibly be for not making The Daily available everywhere? Sure, hardly anyone will buy it outside of the US but at least Apple is footing all the bandwidth costs and making it available everywhere must be a matter of clicking some checkbox. Wired and Popular Science are, for example, both available in the German App Store. (Not that I would ever want to buy The Daily but this is just so stupid.)

FYI, an app submitted to the app store is available everywhere by default (there's an "everywhere" checkbox). If you want to limit its availability, you have to go in and specifically check the regions it'll be available in.

So yeah, it's harder to distribute US-only than to the world. Not sure what The Daily's reasoning is there.

It could be a license-issue. The Daily seems to use wire material from AP. Not sure about their pricing, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's cheaper to distribute their texts in the US alone.

I believe the reason is because they plan to roll out localised versions to different countries.

Although they surely won't roll out special versions to each national app store, so you do have a point there…

I'm not sure why they did it, but it's their prerogative.

Ferner, I don't think you should forget that there is still a lot of web content which is restricted by country — YouTube being a much-despised example of that, although they have obvious reasons there; BBC iPlayer being another example with similar (but far more justifiable) reasons. From those examples, I think one can guess that one of the issues may be copyright: It's easier for them to handle the copyright of just the US.

Opening an US itunes account takes a few seconds if you want to check it today.

Just go into iTunes, select the US store, try downloading the daily, select "create an account", use an email address that is different than the other you used in your real account. In the payment section select "None" (No credit card), and specify an address. Get a random cool address on google map. Put a random phone number. Done.

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