Apple News No Longer Supports RSS
mjtsai.com
mjtsai.com
Here's a video I recorded of this behaviour: 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).
What does calling names accomplish? If the software sucks, criticize the software. Life is hard enough when other people aren't degrading you.
Shaming may not be a nice way to manage a company, but I don't think we should pretend it lacks for efficacy just because we don't like it. Pretending it doesn't work will never change the minds of people who already know from experience that it does work. If you want to change their minds you should first acknowledge that it works, then explain why it working isn't sufficient moral or ethical justification for doing it.
(1) Copy the Apple News deep link to your clipboard
(2) Paste it into a browser that will actually show you the final destination of the app link. This step is impossible to do in Safari on iOS (it will force you to use Apple News, and if that's not installed, it will force you to go to the App Store). So you end up pasting the link into say, iOS Chrome. This still prompts you to go to the App Store for Apple News, but it allows you to cancel this and just load the web page.
(3) After the link has loaded in your alternate iOS web browser, now you can copy the real article link and share it.
The above is way, way, way too cumbersome for the vast majority of iOS users to ever want to do, let alone think about. So, in a practical sense, sharing true article links surfaced via apple news is cumbersome enough to be virtually impossible for most users.
https://apple.news/A4my1m78WSvGiuorZbkAUiQ
I thought deep links used something beside http to specify which app to open.
Regardless, I can’t open that link.
And it's worth noting that simply clicking that link gives me the following alert:
>Restore "News"? > >You followed a link that requires the app "News", which is no longer on your iPhone. You can restore it from the App Store.
The two choices I'm given are "Show in App Store" or "Cancel"
Apple clearly tells me that it is impossible for me to view this webpage unless I install their News app. This is clearly false, technically, and I knew it. But I literally hadn't figured out how to view it until somebody mentioned trying copying and pasting the url into another browser.
The other possible top abuse is the way they block you in your group messages if you switch from iPhone to Android.
It is bad for your messaging to be made by the same company as your phone. Some really problematic conflicts of interest.
Sure it is! You can't continue a group conversation from WhatsApp -- or any other messenger, really -- on another messenger service without manually recreating the group. There is literally nothing which makes iMessage unique in this regard.
Apple consciously doesn't make the APIs for iMessage available.
WhatsApp doesn't provide an API so I could use it on my existing laptop over WiFi for free (the WhatsApp web requires it to be setup on a phone first).
WhatsApp works reliably on a staggeringly broad list of devices. You can get a supported phone for, like, $20 and stick a $5-per-month prepaid SIM in it (many of these plans in low-income countries specifically come with WhatsApp allowances) and be connected.
This is like arguing that free Wi-Fi isn't "free" because some people only use ethernet. If you don't already own a compatible device, you aren't their customer anyway.
But the phone doesn't have to be bought from Facebook, whereas with iMessage you have to pay Apple for a phone.
>maintain a phone line to use WhatsApp.
I wonder what the reason for this is. Maybe to reduce spam? Data collection?
maintaining a phone line doesn't cost hundreds of dollars a year
Except for the vendor lock-in, which makes this a problem to begin with. Other services work on a majority of devices.
Which is a legitimate complaint especially since Apple had said they would be opening it up (or was that FaceTime...I'm not sure).
But that's a wholly different complaint from the fact that Apple, like nearly every other messaging service, does not allow you to export groups to other services.
Sure there is. If you try to "text" someone (as in SMS) and the Messages app (which is the ONLY way you can send SMS on iOS) detects your number as registered to iMessage, it will send an iMessage by default.
So even though your number didn't change, and everyone is still using the "Messages" app to talk to you, it inexplicably doesn't work anymore for group chats, and your regular private message colors have mysteriously turned green.
There are plenty of SMS-API-provider-backed "texting apps" on iOS. There are also softphone apps that provide SMS service.
I think you specifically mean "the only way you can send SMS messages from the DID number that your carrier maps to your phone's MMC IMEI registration.
Not sure what advantages an imessage vs sms groupchat even give me in this era of unlimited texting. Pretty hearts?
Some cellular carriers still charge per MMS message, so group chats (which use MMS) can get expensive. MMS group messages also have some undesirable properties -- in particular, adding or removing users from a group is unreliable, because each device is responsible for generating a list of recipients itself.
Plus, iMessage uses end-to-end encryption. MMS does not.
* more than 10 participants * can set a topic for the group * can add and remove participants * end to end encryption * typing indicators (i think? Can’t remember if these work in groups)
It's buried in there somewhere.
It’s fine to have a settings page that lets you manage pop ups, but a pop up should always be extremely limited in scope.
At the extreme, ‘connect to this wifi network’ and ‘reset to factory settings’ are obviously at different scales of importance and should have significantly different UI. Similarly open this app, and changing a setting are on different scales. Basically, it’s fine if the pop up takes you to some other UI element to make the change, but pop ups should have consistent importance.
Edit: I'll add that this would be particularly annoying if I were actually trying to watch a video because the YouTube app is so outdated that it prompts you to download an update with no option to just watch the video, and pressing the update button brings you to the Play Store app... which requires a Google sign in. So what should have been a simple link to a video instead funnels the user through two apps where they are asked to sign in with a Google account (or create one if they haven't) and download an update... all without even offering to open the link in their browser. That's pretty embarrassing UX.
I am running Android 10 so it's possible it looks different on Android 6.
[0] which I needed to share the link to my laptop, as Google Photos only gives you a "copy link" option for a shared album, not actually sharing it. I am SO fed up with this shit, programs fighting to keep me "in the ecosystem" while sacrificing UX and just blocking you from completing a task.
The first one, the one that you might expect to apply to all files of the same kind, but which actually applies only to the specific file you are doing this for, is under “Open With” in the context menu that comes up when you right click the file (two finger touch by default on MacBook laptops). When you choose Open With > Other and check the “Always Open With” checkbox, you are only creating an association for the file in question, not for the file format in general.
This to me is confusing.
In order to create the association for the file type and not just a specific file, you need to instead select the “Get Info” entry in the context menu for the file. Then, under “Open with” in the window that comes up, this is where you select the application that will apply to all files of same kind.
Did you try the latter method?
The way Finder sets the default view is equally unintuitive
1) Select any file.
2) Change the app in the "Open with" dropdown.
3) If you want it to apply to all files click the "Change all" button.
For example, I can imagine if there were instead two radio buttons in "Open With": "Always for this file", "Always for this extension". All in one place.
As a result it behaved like that:
- When you opened a file, it opened in the program that created it.
- When there were no such program, you could still open it in another program that claimed to understand these files. I don't remember how it was implemented, I think there was a dialog asking if one would like to use another program with some choice (probably the first one that fit).
This was rather handy with formats like "Encapsulated Postscript" in desktop publishing: this format supported both vector and raster images, but one normally used different applications to manipulate them.
This stayed for some time after the move to Mac OS X, but now I believe these things are gone or not used at all.
This is orthogonal to all that, though. It's about the UX to associate an app with a file type, regardless of how that file type is determined.
GNU/Linux doesn't automatically choose which program to use for anything (you can't ./file.png like you can in Windows). In my experience file managers tend to use file extensions to choose which application to use, and that application might then use libmagic and ignore the file extension. (e.g. giving a PNG file the .JPG extension will make the file manager think it's a JPEG, and therefore open it with an image viewer, but the image viewer program will use headers to recognise it as a PNG)
Yes Apple, I really do need to boot up a full blown, 7GB+ sized IDE to edit some markdown. Apparently TextEdit wasn't good enough.
Yeah, I know. If you want good UX, best to switch to living in the 1990s.
Set it up accordingly, you won't go back.
Acme under OSX shines.
Fucking love the concept, but it'd take a lot of work to get the immersiveness of modern systems. e.g. completion/suggestions, linting, etc. none of it is built for plan9.
Ironic because plan9 is amazingly trackball friendly.
https://github.com/jmigpin/editor
It diverges somehow from Acme, but it has autocomplete and a similar interface. I love it :)
https://github.com/moretension/duti
(or `brew install duti`)
I'm not sure how it works, maybe there's some metadata in the HTML. You can see the same thing in action with the Jira app on Cataline now - any Jira link you click will load up and render in the native app.
That said, it's definitely a problem when you're redirecting these links to things you don't actually support any more, without any way to opt out.
Maybe since at one point you did tell it you want to use news to handle it, it keeps going back to it? Although that means most likely the News app was not updated to remove support for that link. Or maybe iOS deep links work differently? (I only use Android)
You can install an alternative like chrome or google search (chrome but better UX IMO) And when you do, anything that opens a page that isn't an embedded webkitview prompts me to pick a browser. It even suggests chrome which I don't have installed (I guess I installed it once and it remembers the protocol registration)
Were you to use the default mail application, for example, its links would always open in Safari.
file a bug / feedback that this is not in line with Apple's privacy first stance
As ever, check first, then complain.
There used to be an issue with amazon with this where you’d try to buy an ebook and be bounced into the app, but you can’t buy ebooks in the app because amazon don’t want to pay Apple 30% of the cost. I just had to delete the amazon app to buy the book. Luckily their website works just as well.
What were the other examples?
Just dealt with this with a sibling who switched to android. How is this legal? It’s quite ridiculous.
I wish everyone in the US just used WhatsApp or another third party app like it seems they do in every other country. Instead, not having an iPhone makes you a pariah because of the green messages.
Why would this be illegal?
Consider this scenario: you have an iMessage group chat of 3 people, and one of the three people has a plan like PayGo[1] and an extremely limited monthly SMS quota. What happens when one of the other two participants suddenly counts against that quota?
There are options, of course, but for consumers as a whole those options are hostile and inelegant - are you gonna pop up a warning saying that messaging these people might now cost you money?
I guess you could make an argument for turning iMessage off by default, but that also seems like a net negative for consumers as you're back to giving phone companies the opportunity to charge exorbitant rates for things like MMS. Then you'd just push everyone to yet another third-party messenger that could be acquired, aggressively monetized, or shut down at any time.
The solution is to deregister your phone number for iMessage; if you don't do this, it will happen automatically after a week or so.
“Desktop class web browsing on the iPad”, except we’re getting rid of link copying. Ridiculous.
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).
It works for all the major sites but it is paid but with self-hosting option.
It's pretty feature rich, fast, keyboard-oriented (supporting vi movement keys), and works great in the terminal.
Another great thing about it is that it runs completely on my own machine, so I don't have to give away information about my reading preferences to any third party, as would be the case for any hosted RSS service.
I love RSS because it gives me lean, fast, ad-free, bloat-free information. I hope it never dies.
[1] - https://newsboat.org/
Large media outfits tend to hate RSS because it puts curation in the hands of users, and that curation function is what a lot of people will pay a lot of money to influence.
Smaller media outfits like it, because they can find readers without paying money to influence the large gatekeepers.
As blogging has "matured", the big shops are feeling more confident that they can lock folks back in to their curation.
It's the upstart outlets that I notice not having RSS at all, with a twitter handle in its place. Pass for me.
Search for what you want, click "News", scroll to the bottom of the page and create an alert.
Then you can select "RSS feed" to get a custom feed for your search terms or news topic.
If I site I want to follow doesn't have RSS, I reach out and let the owner know I can't follow their site via RSS. A few people implemented RSS on their blogs because of it :)
Though I'd very much prefer a linebreak between index listings as a bit of contextual segregation / clausterphobia breaking.
I also find search ... nonintuitive.
Though on balance, it's pretty slick.
By the original newsbeuter author, rsstail and multitail are also damned slick. I've got an rsstail script (with a lot of pretification / scrubbing of the feed streams) that runs as an xrootconsole window on my desktop, alternating amongst various feeds.
Email is HTML formatted how I want, and Gmail will probably not be deprecated any time soon.
Livemarks (or the Chrome/Vivaldi equivalent 'Foxish live RSS') was released after Firefox killed off their Live Bookmarks feature a year or so ago.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/livemarks/
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/foxish-live-rss/jp...
Just sends the latest articles to an IMAP folder. I can use any device that syncs to my email (currently using the built in ActiveSync client on Android), and can access it from webmail, and via Thunderbird on Linux.
You can use it in Firefox right now, and if anyone is interested, I'll port it to Chrome. Honestly I wrote it because my old favorite feed reader Sage wasn't supported after Firefox switched to the web extensions standards.
Give it a peek if you either want to see how it works, or you just want a simple way to browse your favorite sites in your browser.
Source: https://github.com/adamsanderson/brook
Plugin: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/brook-feed-re...
(Okay, now let's get back to the regularly scheduled outrage around the decline of RSS and maybe mention how Google doesn't support its products anymore ;) )
I don’t use it but that was certainly the trend with Apple Maps which was pretty crummy when it first came out.
I don't have high hopes for News, given how much it keeps pushing features that are either user-unfriendly (giant ads in the middle of articles) or designed solely to push you to News+
I used to be a regular (many times a day) user and their changes have led me to stop using it entirely.
Depends where you are, the Apple version of street view is far superior to Google’s.
I wouldn’t care except their API for directions to AirPods or Apple Watch isn’t public. This is grounds for an antitrust suit imho...
Both fall well short of OSM for topics other than finding local businesses. OSM gives me incredible detail, even telling me where water fountains and benches are in the local park. Meanwhile Google Maps doesn't even recognize the restricted access road running through the park, let alone any of the walking trails, let alone any water fountains, benches, etc.
If you can't drive a car on it or through it or to it, Google thinks it may as well not exist.
That may seem to be true some places, but I've seen many places (including around my house) where Google has great coverage of nameless walking and biking trails that aren't open to cars.
Consider for instance this city park in Seattle:
https://www.google.com/maps/@47.6397466,-122.2948284,18.95z
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/47.63987/-122.29488&la...
Google has gotten better in recent years, it now has a few of the walking trails, but compared to OSM it's still absolutely pitiful. Even in high profile locations like Yellowstone National Park, Google Maps is pitiful compared to OSM:
https://www.google.com/maps/@44.3925569,-110.5541906,18z
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/44.39273/-110.55472&la...
Or what do you see that the rest of us don't? :-)
Given what Google uses to build its maps, that's not surprising:
https://d.newsweek.com/en/full/259216/google-street-view.jpg
The love/hate thing is that it picks a more normal route vs optimized. I personally like it because I don’t find that a Google Maps optimizations help in urban settings.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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
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.
Yet 400 boolean data points is nowhere near enough data for any kind of learning system to get anywhere. And without the cloud to aggregate data from millions of other users, it'll never become great.
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/27/tech/apple-screen-time-ap...
> The company estimated that Apple’s move cost it around $3 million, a spokeswoman told the Times.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/04/with-antitrust-investigati...
The rules weren't special. The new exception allowing parental control apps to use MDM is.
The intended use of MDM was always clear. Apple admitted abuse wasn't on their radar until 2017. Cracking down right away would have left users without a replacement.
Do you have any examples that are still in effect?
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2019/04/the-facts-about-paren...
> We started exploring this use of MDM by non-enterprise developers back in early 2017 and updated our guidelines based on that work in mid-2017.
Then they did nothing about it for two years until Screen Time was ready:
> When we found out about these guideline violations, we communicated these violations to the app developers, giving them 30 days to submit an updated app to avoid availability interruption in the App Store.
The backlash they faced led them to recant and update their guidelines allowing the very same parental controls and using the very same MDM technology instead of the APIs they built for Screen Time:
> and in limited cases, companies using MDM for parental control services.
https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ (5.5)
https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/04/apple-lets-parental-app...
Screen Time was introduced in 2018.
Recanting means renouncing a belief. Changing a policy because of backlash doesn't mean they think the old policy was wrong.
There are a wealth of alternate calculator apps, calendar apps, camera apps, etc etc.
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.
I abandoned Apple News pretty quickly as it became clear that it requires a dedicated person maintaining Apple News support.
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.
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.
Personally I still miss Google Reader and consider the demise of that service as one of the biggest losses to the open web.
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.
This is apple "inviting" big magazines/newspapers into iOS or else.
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.
Care to elaborate on this or share a link?
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?
It lets you have the most control over your news feed than anyone else.
(Microsoft, of course, is still the original Microsoft.)
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.”
There are ways to get Facebook, Instagram and Twitter content into RSS too if that’s what you need.
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.
https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/blob/master/README....
I run a long bash file with lines like,
perl twitter_user_to_rss.pl NASAJPL > ~/limbo/www/rss/NASAJPL.xml
perl twitter_search_to_rss_wtf.pl "electrostatic sail" > ~/limbo/www/rss/electrostatic-sail.xml
Pretty lively dead standard!