They can see the writing on the wall. And Jony Ive long ago hinted at the future of portable devices- the hardware simply will get out of the way so that the content will shine through (or something to that effect). In the not too distant future, and maybe even today, all top tier smartphones are pretty much identical. The differentiator now and especially in the future will be software AND available content. Apple's multi billion dollar gamble is that in the future they'll have the best content- so users will be compelled to buy their devices (which will be required to consume it).
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Apple News Inking Deals With Publishers for Exclusive Video Content
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I’m so sick and tired of reading the negative posts about Apple News. From my observations, most people (1) first opened it in iOS 9 and closed it, forever to conclude AN is garbage, (2) those who have given AN a shot never bothered to curate the content they want to see by liking, disliking sources, or setting up specific topics that interest them, or (3) complain that Apple, which is a multi-national corporation, absolutely MUST provide AN to every country in every language at all times.
I’d gladly pay for AN if I could get my local news populated in the news feeds, and have exclusive, in-depth articles that can’t be found elsewhere because I like my personalized tastes aggravated in one place, vs. jumping from app to app and site to site (usually paying multiple monthly subscription fees for each).
I am probably in the minority but I look forward to the possibilities AN can bring. I tried Flipboard and find AN to be far superior. Then again, I also prefer Apple Music over Spotify, but there’s a circular argument that probably will never end in the MacRumors forums either.
I’d gladly pay for AN if I could get my local news populated in the news feeds, and have exclusive, in-depth articles that can’t be found elsewhere because I like my personalized tastes aggravated in one place, vs. jumping from app to app and site to site (usually paying multiple monthly subscription fees for each).
I am probably in the minority but I look forward to the possibilities AN can bring. I tried Flipboard and find AN to be far superior. Then again, I also prefer Apple Music over Spotify, but there’s a circular argument that probably will never end in the MacRumors forums either.
When did Apple release the News app on iOS… iOS9 was it? Well, in 2+ years the News app has still to appear on my iPhone/iPad and I live is Western Europe. News on iOS is merely aggregation… exactly what part of this is difficult?! I'm not asking much here. So talking about improvements of something that doesn't even exist for me is simply total BS and is nothing on top of nothing.
I'm also still not seeing the Series section on my Apple TV either.
The issue I have with Apple News is I get a lot of duplicate content, and it's curated poorly for me. It's much easier for me to subscribe to RSS feeds from publications that I care about. For example in Feedly, I group my publications by categories and read them as so.
However when using Apple News, they make it difficult to peruse quickly. The format displayed for Apple News often shows publications that I don't value for credibility, and they don't sort it well by categories. I don't want to go through and do the like/dislike thing because I have limited time.
Also, Feedly works in the browser and is agnostic across devices (I use Newsify on my iPhone to consume Feedly). Apple News is too proprietary to use on a day to day basis when most of my apps now are 3rd party on my iPhone.
I understand where you’re coming from, but I believe this qualifies my point: if one won’t/can’t/don’t take the effort to wean out the sources that one don’t want to read, one won’t get the full benefits. I admit it took a couple afternoons of liking and disliking sources, but not only did those sources disappear instantly, the curation method was smart enough to get rid of similar sources I equally didn’t want to see.
Entering sources and keywords in the “Following” section is also extremely beneficial.
Apple Music works in the same manner. I read on the forums constantly in the “Apple vs. Spotify” gibberish posts things like, “I hate how AM shows me hip-hop all the time,” or “My ‘For You’ never selects music I’m interested in,” etc. It just takes a bit of time to get the software to curate to one’s tastes by liking/disliking and selecting interesting playlists to winnow the results.
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Well, Apple Pay is still rolling out to other countries as well, and that tech has been “available” for 2+ years. And when a new Apple product is launched, it usually hits a select number of countries as well. I could equally gripe that the Fiat took years to come back to the US, as well as a multitude of apps that I can’t access from the US Apple Store.
I compare these similarities to social media when it first emerged (Friendster -> LiveJournal -> Xanga -> MySpace -> Facebook -> Instagram -> Twitter -> Snapchat, etc). For each platform, you invest the time to accomplish the same thing. It's really annoying, and not worth it after a while.
For news, I went from Yahoo RSS -> Google Reader -> Pulse -> Newsify (standalone) -> Feedly with Newsify. In each transition, the results and rewards were identical. I tried Apple News for a few days, and I always went back to Newsify because the UX was prohibiting me from reading everything quickly on my subway ride before getting into work.
The glaring main issues with Apple news for me including the above are:
- NO DESKTOP app or accessible via browser for PC (and Mac?). This means I can't view news at work without picking up my phone.
- Tied to Apple. This means that all my data points are now tethered to Apple which means I would be handcuffed if I ever switched to Android or a better XYZ platform.
- Newspaper like UX (poor use of real estate for mobile and hypothetically desktop if it were available). I never liked the "card" UX for Pinterest or anything similar to it for consuming a lot of data.
These are very fair points, and well articulated. I think in time the first two bullets can be worked out, especially now that Apple is looking to create revenue from the app. As for practical UI on iOS, I long ago gave up on that one... bold fonts and adequate white space seem to be the norm!
I’m a big fan of the News app. But I don’t feel like they’ve pushed it enough - not many people actually know it exists or how to get the best from it. The more I’ve used it the better content it’s been serving me.
They definitely need to expand it outside of the couple of countries it’s currently in... what’s the hold up?
They definitely need to expand it outside of the couple of countries it’s currently in... what’s the hold up?