Apple News+ in iOS 14 opens articles in Apple News, intercepting website traffic

A while back, my mom was sending me links to Apple News articles. I had deleted[0] the app from my phone, and tapping the links wouldn’t let me read the stories in the browser because it knew I was on an iPhone. Instead, it tried to open in the app, and popped up a system dialog saying I had to reinstall Apple News. Truly aggravating.

[0]Preinstalled iOS apps you delete are actually just hidden and disabled until you “reinstall” from the App Store

Tapping on links from some publishers opens the article up in the Apple News app in iOS 13 as well. What’s new and noteworthy here is that apparently iOS 14 includes an option to disable that behavior, whereas in iOS 13 the only way to open those links in Safari is to long press the link and opening it in the background.

So Apple is really against the free and easy web access via browser. They lost browser war to Chrome and this is their revenge imo. Nothing is wrong from Apple's perspective - they really do a lot of hard work on their hardware devices and they don't want to end Apple's success story like other hardware businesses

The screenshot’s help text suggests an explanation which makes more sense than the speculation: if the site has a paywall and you subscribe through Apple News+, this populates the embedded web view’s cookies so you don’t get hit the paywall. It can’t do that to the system Safari any more than any other app but it can for an internal app.

If their goal was intercepting traffic it wouldn’t require a subscription.

How does this work (I don't use Apple News)?

Are the news stories scraped by Apple and republished from apple.com, or do some news authors give permission to Apple to republish articles from Apple's platform?

Apple News+ is a subscription service which provides access to a lot of different publications, some of which have their own paywalls.

I subscribe to Apple News+ and like it, although I think there are a number of usability issues.

One is that I would like to be able to quickly search for the Apple News version of a story based on a headline I find on the web. This would be in order to avoid having to register with every publisher who is trying to drive me into subscribing by limiting free access to articles.

In those cases, I'd like for the publishers to be compensated based on the payments I already send Apple.

The problem is that the search function inside the Apple News app doesn't appear to be one of the app's major features. I would really like to see this capability strengthened.