Apple News+ in iOS 14 Opens Article Web Links in Apple News, Intercepting Traffic From Websites

Wow, I wasn't expecting such a misinformed article here. Let's quickly review. When you subscribe to Apple News+ you get access to content within the app that is typically also available to non News+ subscribers behind pay walls on a given publisher's website. That's great, but what happens if you stumble on a news article outside of Apple News+ that you're interested to read? You have access to the content within Apple's app but it could be difficult to find it there, yet you're confronted to a pay wall on the publisher's website. Currently, Apple provides a way around by providing the use of a user specific and Apple provided email and password to use your News+ account on any pay wall of News+ participating organization. However, it's kind of a cumbersome solution. Now, this new feature basically makes this process automatic. And if you don't like being redirected to the News+ app (although that would be strange as the reading experience is much better compared to most crummy websites) you just have to toggle off the feature. Big whoop, right? And for all those clamouring that medias would loose money, you're just wrong: Apple pays royalties when a News+ subscriber accesses some content of a participing news publisher. What the publisher potentially would have made through publicity on their website, they will make through Apple News+ royalties instead. And you can be sure something like that is well provided for in the contracts that news organizations sign with Apple. So, ironically, this is basically a big non-news story. And I really didn't expect such Apple fearmongering from MacRumors.
 
newyorksole said:
I actually don’t mind the Apple News app. I do feel like they did this for a reason though. I wonder if it’ll change.
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Me either actually. And although there’s not a regular search index you can search by topics and then whatever relevant news stories come up at that point. I’m not mad at it. But I am when I’m redirected to a article I’d have to pay for.
 
As far as I understand, this feature is only enabled for Apple News+ subscribers. If that’s the case, what’s the issue? If you subscribe to Apple News+, I think it’s safe to assume you do not directly subscribe to any of the publishers included with Apple News. For those users, this feature helps avoid seeing paywalls and brings them directly to the content where they are paying for it. Whereas, for users who do not subscribe to Apple News+, nothing changes.

That being said, as some have suggested, I would much prefer all Apple News+ publishers to allow Apple News+ subscribers direct access to the content on their sites via Sign in with Apple (in addition to access via the News app).

I also share the complaints others have voiced that Apple should allow non-subscribers to completely disable any tabs or content regarding Apple News+ if they choose not to subscribe. The constant push into Apple services with News+, TV+, TV Channels, and even in Books is tacky, especially for what used to be regarded as a higher tier brand. I pay a significant amount of money for the devices themselves, I should be able to enjoy the content I own or subscribe to without being constantly sold to.

But in regard to this feature alone - I support it, as long as it is only turned on by default for paid subscribers of News+.
 
Jonathan Leclerc said:
Currently, Apple provides a way around by providing the use of a user specific and Apple provided email and password to use your News+ account on any pay wall of News+ participating organization.
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I’ve never heard of this before - how do I obtain the ‘Apple provided email and password’ to use my news+ account on the pay wall of a news+ source’s website?
 
coolfactor said:
I am still trying to figure out Apple's goal with Apple News+. Do they think they can bring a better user experience? Well, I know they can! I just don't want to pay extra for it when other news apps are "free". ;) I will say that I've grown disenchanted with certain news apps displaying ads before live streams, though.
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I think Apple's goal is pretty clear. They've simply misjudged the market. It's obvious that News+ is a complete dud. Consumers aren't interested. The app is lousy, but so is the Music app and plenty of people still subscribe to Apple Music. People simply don't want to pay for news when one can find an endless stream of free content with minimal effort. If you're a publisher and need a service like Apple News+ to survive, you're already on life support. I also don't think the general public (as opposed to people who spend time on tech forums) cares much about privacy and advertising, not enough to make either a selling point for a service like News+.
 
The issue right now is that in order to read multiple publications, you have to have multiple subscriptions. You need to read different sources to read balanced reporting and learn different viewpoints. I personally like to read a good cross section of both liberal and conservative reputable media. Serious newspapers often cost $35/mo or more. But you do not have time to read them all at the same day or time. So, most people will not pay that. At the same time "surfacing" does not allow you to read a newspaper. It rather is a random gamble on what articles at any given time you may see.

Btw, you can go to share in iOS today, and open a link in News+, but most content providers appear to have this switched off. It no longer works for instance for WSJ, that gets you instead to their home page in News+ if the article was not already "surfaced".

Perhaps $9.99/mo appears too cheap, but paying multiple times $35/mo is definitely too expensive, and news papers kill themselves with this kind of pricing. In the end, more consumers are driven to trashy sensational pundit outlets (you know who you are). Perhaps having a tiered subscription scheme in News+ would help our society to be better informed and counter conspiracy theories and trolled content.
 
Jonathan Leclerc said:
Wow, I wasn't expecting such a misinformed article here. Let's quickly review. When you subscribe to Apple News+ you get access to content within the app that is typically also available to non News+ subscribers behind pay walls on a given publisher's website. That's great, but what happens if you stumble on a news article outside of Apple News+ that you're interested to read? You have access to the content within Apple's app but it could be difficult to find it there, yet you're confronted to a pay wall on the publisher's website. Currently, Apple provides a way around by providing the use of a user specific and Apple provided email and password to use your News+ account on any pay wall of News+ participating organization. However, it's kind of a cumbersome solution. Now, this new feature basically makes this process automatic. And if you don't like being redirected to the News+ app (although that would be strange as the reading experience is much better compared to most crummy websites) you just have to toggle off the feature. Big whoop, right? And for all those clamouring that medias would loose money, you're just wrong: Apple pays royalties when a News+ subscriber accesses some content of a participing news publisher. What the publisher potentially would have made through publicity on their website, they will make through Apple News+ royalties instead. And you can be sure something like that is well provided for in the contracts that news organizations sign with Apple. So, ironically, this is basically a big non-news story. And I really didn't expect such Apple fearmongering from MacRumors.
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Ok, this makes more sense. Thanks for the explanation...
 
GadgetBen said:
I hate the media. All lies or click bait and about 1000 adverts and trackers.

Apple News should be like Apple Music and they should have their own independent, unbiased news solution.

Just like Apple Music has hand picked DJ's for their radio station, they could do this with Apple News and journalists.
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And who decides what’s biased or not. I’d rather users decide what news sources they want to view/follow.
 
Unlike app developers, News publishers have a choice to avoid the bully tactics. The low adoption rate of Apple news plus by consumers shows just how Apple struggles with its services when there is competition, but they have to also listen to the publishers or there will be a low adoption rate from publishers. Thankfully, this is just a beta feature so they can make it not on by default during golden master after the feature is fully tested
 
Jonathan Leclerc said:
... but what happens if you stumble on a news article outside of Apple News+ that you're interested to read? You have access to the content within Apple's app but it could be difficult to find it there, yet you're confronted to a pay wall on the publisher's website. Currently, Apple provides a way around by providing the use of a user specific and Apple provided email and password to use your News+ account on any pay wall of News+ participating organization.
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So, how exactly does this work? For instance, I like reading WSJ. In the past, it was possible to get to a paywalled article in Safari on iOS and "share" with News+ app. But this stopped working sometime early this year. If the article is not "surfaced" already in News+ then you are just ending up on the landing page of that publication in News+. Or in other words, you cannot read articles that are not surfaced already in News+. I have observed the same for other newspapers on News+.

So, how exactly would I get a username and password for WSJ for instance, that I can use on their site to read all articles?
 
Many ‌Apple News‌+ users have been asking for a way to open up web links in ‌Apple News‌+ to avoid paywalls on the web
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That sounds good to me. The paywall for the only newspaper in my city has bugs relating to Safari tracking prevention and not wanting to be tracked I won't use another browser - so I'm constantly having issues with pages that don't load. But I still pay, because aside from buying the actual paper (even more expensive) it's the only way to get local news.

Unfortunately even though their parent company was an Apple News+ launch partner... none of the articles written by journalists in my city are posted to Apple News.
 
GadgetBen said:
I hate the media. All lies or click bait and about 1000 adverts and trackers.

Apple News should be like Apple Music and they should have their own independent, unbiased news solution.

Just like Apple Music has hand picked DJ's for their radio station, they could do this with Apple News and journalists.
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You can set Apple News to only show feeds you follow. That will cut out seeing trash you don’t want to see.
 
Marbles1 said:
What a horrid feature, especially for desktop.

The Apple News app is awful. They should have made the access to magazines front and centre, instead it's like a child's version of an rss reader only worse. It presents a poorly categorised dull mix of the same kind of news stories.

The curated stuff, when political, takes a very narrow political view too. It's quite preachy.

I got 6 months of apple news plus for free through my mobile provider, I tried really hard to like it. In the end I only use it to occasionally read a Times (UK) article, which are really hard to find as there's no proper search engine in the app.

Once the 6 months free expires, I'll be deleting the app across all my iDevices.

Subbing separately to news services, whatever mix you want, that interest you and you'll actually read seems like a better options.

Apple News+ is a solution looking for a problem.
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Not weird at all. Those of us who like Apple News would prefer to read articles there than on the web for a number of reasons, namely privacy and better UI.
 
I thought that was awesome move by Apple.

The biggest downside of Apple News app is - there's no comment section so I have to click few clicks to get to comment sections.
 
Jonathan Leclerc said:
Wow, I wasn't expecting such a misinformed article here. Let's quickly review. When you subscribe to Apple News+ you get access to content within the app that is typically also available to non News+ subscribers behind pay walls on a given publisher's website. That's great, but what happens if you stumble on a news article outside of Apple News+ that you're interested to read? You have access to the content within Apple's app but it could be difficult to find it there, yet you're confronted to a pay wall on the publisher's website. Currently, Apple provides a way around by providing the use of a user specific and Apple provided email and password to use your News+ account on any pay wall of News+ participating organization. However, it's kind of a cumbersome solution. Now, this new feature basically makes this process automatic. And if you don't like being redirected to the News+ app (although that would be strange as the reading experience is much better compared to most crummy websites) you just have to toggle off the feature. Big whoop, right? And for all those clamouring that medias would loose money, you're just wrong: Apple pays royalties when a News+ subscriber accesses some content of a participing news publisher. What the publisher potentially would have made through publicity on their website, they will make through Apple News+ royalties instead. And you can be sure something like that is well provided for in the contracts that news organizations sign with Apple. So, ironically, this is basically a big non-news story. And I really didn't expect such Apple fearmongering from MacRumors.
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Exactly. People jump to conclusions so quickly.
 
dwaite said:
Why on earth would publishers not like this feature? Rather than trying to monetize ads, the publisher gets to monetize the Apple News+ subscription. Is this not why they opted into News+?
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Publishers don't get to track what a person reads.

Publishers cannot get readers to engage with other reads by posting/reading comments.
 
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I can see why this would be convenient, but the way they did it is wacky. There's no obvious way to prevent it, and see below, I think it dupes users into paying for free content. Gave me a reason to fire up Firefox, just wanted to read my article.
 
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Jonathan Leclerc said:
That's great, but what happens if you stumble on a news article outside of Apple News+ that you're interested to read? You have access to the content within Apple's app but it could be difficult to find it there, yet you're confronted to a pay wall on the publisher's website.
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Usually an article on Apple News+ is actually free at the source! https://www.rollingstone.com/politi...ssley-jamil-smith-black-lives-matter-1027705/ for example, I see this on News, and it says "News+". So if you open this in Safari, you get sent to News, where it asks you to pay?

Someone please test this :) I have the latest macOS installed on a separate drive and can't reboot rn.
 
This is what the App Store has done to Apple. Apple News is an awful product. So do they make the product better? No, they try and prop it up by making the user experience worse in another more established part of the operating system.

It's why Apple's software engineering is going downhill so fast. Rubbish products get propped up by anti-competitive and anti-customer behaviour elsewhere instead of either improving or dying.
 
Jonathan Leclerc said:
Wow, I wasn't expecting such a misinformed article here. Let's quickly review. When you subscribe to Apple News+ you get access to content within the app that is typically also available to non News+ subscribers behind pay walls on a given publisher's website. That's great, but what happens if you stumble on a news article outside of Apple News+ that you're interested to read? You have access to the content within Apple's app but it could be difficult to find it there, yet you're confronted to a pay wall on the publisher's website. Currently, Apple provides a way around by providing the use of a user specific and Apple provided email and password to use your News+ account on any pay wall of News+ participating organization. However, it's kind of a cumbersome solution. Now, this new feature basically makes this process automatic. And if you don't like being redirected to the News+ app (although that would be strange as the reading experience is much better compared to most crummy websites) you just have to toggle off the feature. Big whoop, right? And for all those clamouring that medias would loose money, you're just wrong: Apple pays royalties when a News+ subscriber accesses some content of a participing news publisher. What the publisher potentially would have made through publicity on their website, they will make through Apple News+ royalties instead. And you can be sure something like that is well provided for in the contracts that news organizations sign with Apple. So, ironically, this is basically a big non-news story. And I really didn't expect such Apple fearmongering from MacRumors.
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That's all great, but depends if Apple pays the news publishers less.?
 
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