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Tim Cook: 40 Million People are Using Apple News

I actually like the app layout, and the feel of the app, it's simple and easy to use, which is a good start. It's just the content on there is very very limited at the moment, Flipboard covers A LOT more. In the technology board I get about 30 new posts a day, whereby most I have already read on social media, Flipboard adds loads more, always gives me something to read ina moment of boredem. Until Apple News can add hundreds and hundreds of new articles a day to read I am not very interested.
 
Never heard of it either. If someone asked me what I thought it was, though, I'd have said it was an app that contains nothing but Apple "news" articles about how their quarterly earning were record-settings, how sales are higher than ever, how any of their products are selling more than anyone elses, and how record numbers of people are flocking away from Windows and Android to embrace OSX and iOS.

But it sounds like it has real news? ;)
 
I had to change my region to US in order to give it a try. Ditched Flipboard.

It just need a little more sources and fix that old stories bug (Some content is hours late).
 
Waxhead138 said:
Tim Cook: 40 Million People are Using Apple News.....

.....While wishing it was Flipboard.
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I agree. I think what Tim is saying that 40 million people have downloaded iOS 9. It comes default with it. I love Apple's concept of consumer using an Apple app. Shove it down the throat of the user by automatically pushing the app and not allowing it to be deleted. And then count it as users using it. Apple News looks so 90s in front of FlipBoard.
 
kyjaotkb said:
you cuold change your settings to US and then back to your regional ones and Apple News would be there. Granted, it would disappear whenever you restart your iPhone...
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Well, I have somehow accepted that most services are introduced rather late over here...same counts for Apple Pay right at the very moment...
 
If swiping right to get to the search screen and noticing the news stream and selecting an article or two on occasion makes me a user, then I’m a user. But I certainly do not open the app directly.
 
fitshaced said:
Nope and nope. It doesn't refresh for me and i don't have many channels.
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It doesn't refresh automatically for me either. I just tried it again on my iPhone, connected to Wifi, and this is the time-wasting process I have to follow to check recent news:

1. Tapped to open Apple News
2. Presented with a bunch of "2w" old news in "For You". Nothing else happens.
3. Scrolled up a bit, then the top of the screen finally said "Checking for New Stories"
4. Wait 21 seconds (I counted)
5. Then "235 New Stores" displays at top of screen, but still nothing happens
6. Then I have to start scrolling up, looking at old news, and newer stuff starts to appear, in chronological order (newest at top)
7. Scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll ALL THE WAY to the top to finally read current headlines.

That's terrible design. If it can update in the background, it should update in the background, and I should see the NEWEST stuff the moment I open the app.
 
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I used Unread as my RSS reader prior to Apple News. It has a nice minimalist design and a reader view function that loads full articles without forcing you to view the original website, so you get all the content with no ads and good formatting. It gets its RSS information from my Feedly account, and can connect with other newsreaders as well. My biggest complaint with the app was that it took a long time to refresh and show new articles, even when manually refreshing.

Then Apple News came out. I tried it for a week. The only improvements over Unread that I could see was images in the list view (Unread is text only in list view), and faster refresh. However, ads were all over the place and I couldn't tell Apple that I disliked specific articles. Since much of their delivery algorithm is based on generic categories (entertainment, politics, science, etc), I got a lot of crap like People magazine and stuff and it cluttered up the feed. I ended up removing the generic categories from my list of likes but the ads still remained, and for most articles I was still clicking through to the website, only now instead of Safari where I have an ad blocker, it was in Apple News.

After that week I went back to Unread and lo and behold, their refresh had been fixed and it was now almost instantaneous. Now the only gripe I have with it is that some articles get listed with a future date and sit at the top of my article list until that date passes, but it's usually one or two articles tops. I threw Apple News in a folder and haven't looked at it again. Unread is superior in almost every way.

Edit: Since people mentioned it, I just pulled up an article from my search page, it was from the Washington Post. The article loaded in Apple News and then was immediately obscured by a full page ad. I closed the app, didn't even read the article.
 
avanpelt said:
I suspect that they're counting people who have opened the app only once in that number. Technically, that's still a "user" of the app but it's not a regular user of the app. If they were counting regular users of the app, they probably would've been more specific (i.e. 40 users each week).
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There, fixed that for you.
 
H2SO4 said:
There, fixed that for you.
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Ha! ;)

Except if the app only had 40 users per week, Apple wouldn't have mentioned a number at all. They probably would've just said something generic like, "we're excited about Apple News and we look forward to seeing what developers are going to do with this great new platform."

I'm pretty confident that Apple makes vague statements like that about a product or service when they're not satisfied with the numbers they're seeing internally. They either make vague statements about how excited they are about the product and/or they lump the usage or sales numbers in with another category like they've done with the watch so it's impossible for the public to tell how it's selling. Believe me, when Apple is satisfied internally with how the watch is selling, its sales numbers will no longer be lumped into the "Other" category in the figures Apple makes public.
 
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i go back and forth between clipboard and Apple news. As the content gets better I think I could see myself switching permanently. I do like for example that there is no 10 read limit for NYT on Apple News.
 
I like the layout that certain publishers are using in Apple News, and that's what keeps me coming back to it. What prevents me from using it more is the lack of a night/dark mode, since that's when I do most of my reading. I end up saving the articles to Instapaper and reading them from there using their night mode, which unfortunately removes the pretty formatting.
 
zzLZHzz said:
the number could be higher if it wasn't restricted in other countries
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Maybe Apple will enable for other countries (probably UK next. Then Australia…) and add the users as "readers", even if they just opened the app once. I can imagine Apple PR:
"We went from 40 million to 100 million readers in a few months!". That way it seems like people are liking the product. Probably they'll use it as leverage negotiating with publishers.
 
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wildcat88 said:
6. Then I have to start scrolling up, looking at old news, and newer stuff starts to appear, in chronological order (newest at top)
7. Scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll-scroll ALL THE WAY to the top to finally read current headlines.
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You know how tapping the status bar work in iOS yeah?
 
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