{"id":24708,"date":"2019-03-25T16:32:44","date_gmt":"2019-03-25T20:32:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=24708"},"modified":"2019-07-30T09:48:32","modified_gmt":"2019-07-30T13:48:32","slug":"apple-news-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/25\/apple-news-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple News+"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Hardwick<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Access to over 300 popular magazines, leading newspapers and digital publishers is included in each Apple News+ subscription, with topics covering everything from entertainment, fashion and news, to politics, health, lifestyle and travel.<\/p>\n

Apple News+ subscribers can access current and past issues and individual articles from magazines such as The Atlantic, Better Homes & Gardens, Bon Appétit, Condé Nast Traveler, ELLE, Entertainment Weekly, ESPN The Magazine, Esquire, Food & Wine, Good Housekeeping, GQ, Health, InStyle, Martha Stewart Living, National Geographic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, Parents, People, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, Runner’s World, Sports Illustrated, TIME, Travel + Leisure, Vanity Fair, Vogue, WIRED and Woman’s Day.<\/p>\n

In addition, Apple News+ includes The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times and Toronto Star, Canada’s largest daily newspaper.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Benjamin Mayo<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The service is branded as News+ and is available today with the release of the new iOS and macOS software updates. $9.99 includes family sharing, so you can share with up to six Family members at no extra cost.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>

Apple said there are over 5 billion articles read every month inside Apple News, making it the #1 news app in the world. Apple touted its new service as a defence against clickbait with a focus on quality journalism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

I continue to find Apple News to be disappointing. It’s like Apple reinvented the RSS reader with less privacy (everything goes through an Apple tracking URL) and a worse user experience (less control over fonts, text that isn’t selectable, no searching within or across stories). So the idea of content that must be accessed from the app—and likely can’t even be opened in Safari—is not attractive to me.<\/p>\n\n

Questions:<\/p>\n\n

If I’m reading elsewhere and come across a link to a paywalled article at one of the above publications, is there an easy way to read it using an Apple News+ subscription?<\/p>\n\n

How exactly does Apple News reduce clickbait? The publications will still get more traffic for certain articles. They’ll have statistics for this, as will Apple.<\/p>\n\n

John Gruber<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Unanswered question: does an Apple News Plus subscription get you access to the WSJ website too? Or is only<\/em> through the News app? I’m guessing it’s only through the news app because how would the Journal get you a login if they don’t get info about News Plus subscribers?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Brian Stelter<\/a>:<\/p>\n

WSJ internal memo says Apple News+ users will only get a “curated collection of general interest news.” To access biz reporting, you’ll still have to subscribe to the WSJ. Memo says “our collaboration with Apple will also extend to areas like video, voice, market data and AI.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n

Peter Kafka<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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ACTUALLY I just spoke to an Apple exec who believes Apple news subs will get full access to wsj.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Update (2019-03-26): Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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\nApple News+ Magazines doesn’t seem to use FairPlay (😐), and preloads the first few pages of PDF-based issues regardless of whether you have a subscription (🤦‍♂️). Thus, you can just rip them out of the cache on macOS and reconstitute the original PDF. Kinda irresponsible<\/p>\n

(With a full subscription, there is absolutely nothing stopping somebody ripping the entire source PDF to an Apple News Magazine)<\/p>\n

I figured one of the most obvious things about the Texture acquisition would be that magazine publishers could count on Apple to FairPlay their content, something Texture could not do alone. I guess I was wrong? 😅<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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It gets better! Even without a subscription, the magazine preview in Apple News downloads a manifest which happens to list all the pages. All of which, hosted in public, sans any protection. So it takes minutes to write a tool that downloads an entire magazine issue page by page<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

As a publisher, I would be pretty disappointed. There’s a comedy of errors here with things that would have been easily preventable, if anybody thought to consider them. Clearly, nobody expected anybody to look. Apple knows better; all of its other services use FairPlay & auth<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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It is hard to imagine Apple shipping a magazine service for iPhone where 50% of the catalog is just PDFs of the print magazines that have to be furiously pinch-zoomed to read anything…<\/p>\n

Each PDF page is served individually and has multiple representations; they could easily have served iPhone-formatted pages if the publishers were willing<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Steve Troughton-Smith<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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It takes just one tiny swizzle in the News app to enable the AppleInternal subscription mode, which authorizes your account for free access to everything. I think somebody needs to have a sit-down with the News team<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Federico Viticci<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I went in and counted all the magazines available in Apple News+ – including whether they are using Apple News Format or traditional PDF pages. Here is the full list so far. Enjoy.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Joe Cieplinski<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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I get that regular magazine readers are accustomed to just leafing through the whole rag. But from a digital standpoint, being able to save for later seems like common sense.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

James O’Leary<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Mac is starting a 2+ year transition where the end goal is Mac apps turn into iOS apps, it’ll be extremely buggy during that period, it’s unclear how that’ll help either platform, and you’re still stuck on 5 year old form factors on a 20 year old OS.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Amol Sharma<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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To clarify, based on people familiar with it: Apple subs will have access to almost all WSJ content. But the app will surface stories thought to be appealing to a general interest reader. The thinking is, consumption beyond what’s actively surfaced will be limited.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

modest proposal<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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so News Corp is hoping that the UX is shitty enough that people paying $30\/mo for WSJ won’t cancel for $20\/mo savings because it will be too hard to find most of the content?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dave Nanian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Not to be an idiot, but what’s the difference between Apple News+ and Texture at this point? Why is Texture still there? Why didn’t existing Texture customers get automatically transitioned to Apple News+?<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Paul Kehrer<\/a> (via Hacker News<\/a>):<\/p>\n

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However, instead of simply being locked behind a hardware feature gate, Apple chose to disable it much more forcefully. If you enter China with a US iPhone (e.g. one purchased in the US from a US carrier or at a US Apple Store), using a US carrier, with your phone set to the US region, and with location services disabled for the News app, you will still receive this message upon opening News[…]<\/p>\n

To accomplish this censorship Apple is using a form of location fingerprinting that is not available to normal applications on iOS. It works like this: despite the fact that your phone uses a SIM from a US carrier it must connect to a Chinese cellular network. Apple is using private APIs to identify that you are in mainland China based on the name of the underlying cellular network and blocking access to the News app.<\/p>\n

[…]<\/p>\n

This censorship occurs despite the fact that when in China a cell phone using a foreign SIM is not subject to the firewall restrictions (all traffic is tunneled back to your provider first), so Google, Twitter, Facebook, et al all work fine on a non-mainland China SIM even though you’re connected via China Mobile or China Unicom’s network.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Dave DeLong<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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Hey @apple, your auto-renewing subscription screen is in violation of guideline 3.1.2 and your app should be rejected.<\/p>\n

For starters… no links to privacy policy or support page; no info on how to cancel.<\/p>\n

I’m honestly surprised there hasn’t been an extremely public lawsuit against @apple about the huge #DoubleStandards and inconsistent application of the App Review Guidelines.<\/p>\n

Seems ripe for a class-action lawsuit, IMO.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n

Previously:<\/p>\n