Switching From RSS to Apple News Format

This blog has been available in Apple News from the beginning, but I’ve recently switched from having Apple News fetch the RSS feed to using the Publish to Apple News WordPress plug-in to push updates to Apple News.

Pros:

• New posts show up in Apple News more quickly. (Apple News could have polled the RSS more frequently, as many feed readers do; it just chose not to.)

• I can update the content of old posts. Typos don’t have to live forever. (Most feed readers can do this, too, but Apple News didn’t.)

• I can update the content of posts that are too old to appear in the feed. (RSS can’t do that.)

• It shows the proper title for each article, whereas with RSS it would use the full page title (unlike all the other feed readers I’ve seen).

• You have more control over the fonts and layout, and can include images. (For now, I’m just using the default template.)

• There’s an analytics feature.

• You can get paid for showing ads that Apple sells. (I have not enabled this feature.)

Cons:

• Once you switch away from RSS, there’s no way to go back.

• With RSS, each post automatically gets a link at the bottom to Read Original Story, and this can also be accessed by swiping up. This is no longer present when using Apple News Format; it seems that Apple doesn’t want to send any traffic to your site or let readers see comments or other additional content.

• I was able to hack the plug-in’s PHP to manually insert a link at the bottom. However, for reasons I don’t understand, Apple News is much slower to display the page after I tap the link. I get a spinner for about 5 seconds, whereas with the old RSS link it seemed instantaneous.

• Each new post or update generates a notification banner in the comments section of WordPress that I have to manually clear. This cannot be done in bulk.

• Posts with emoji generate seemingly spurious errors: “The following JSON errors were detected: Invalid unicode character sequences were found that could cause display issues on Apple News.”

• It doesn’t show the date when the content was updated, only when it was originally posted. Nor is there a way to sort or search for updates. (This didn’t work with RSS, either, though.)

Overall, I think switching to Apple News Format was a win, mainly because the RSS support was so bad. I’m still mystified by Apple News itself. It’s drawn rave reviews from some quarters, but I find the interface cumbersome and have not found its content recommendations helpful. Perhaps the difference is that some people are comparing it with social networks and Google News, whereas I’m a longtime user of desktop feed readers.

Update (2018-04-20): Adam Engst:

For those who are already using the News app, I’m pleased to say that TidBITS is now available in Apple News via the Apple News Format, so our articles look better than ever before on both the iPhone and iPad, as you can see in these screenshots.

Update (2018-07-20): Matt Birchler:

See, I use a WordPress extension to post my stuff to Apple News and it had been working great for a couple years, but apparently iOS 11 made something not work quite right and my posts weren’t getting assigned “categories” on Apple News.

I tried my best, but the nothing solved my problem until the dev updated the plugin.

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