Leave a Review Apple News
If the app stops being active it loses back trail, and still accessibility issues
Sometimes you can drill very far down the list of related articles, but still want to go back a few to drill down another path of related articles and so on. If somebody calls, or you have to open a banking app, whatever, news tends to be one of the first apps that the phone deactivates in the app switcher. So then when you go back you lose your entire back trail, and the best you can do is grab some articles from your history. Unfortunately, it seems that with history, the related links change.
News has always had accessibility issues with voiceover. The rotor changes it’s ordering of items; when video or social media posts are embedded in articles, as they are increasingly these days, strange behavior occurs such as jumping back to the top of the article or acting like it’s the end of the article (things that sighted users would never put up with). Sometimes advertising in the articles also causes reading to stop or loop or get stuck.Show lessDarkSquared42
Needs some tweaks
The service itself is great but the app has some very annoying quirks. For example, grabbing the source URL for a story that I want to share is seemingly impossible; I’m forced to use the Apple News url, which is not ideal. I also don’t like how reading a story from a magazine I don’t follow automatically adds that entire magazine to my library. If I want to follow a magazine, that should be totally up to me. This annoying behavior makes me less likely to read some stories because I know I’m going to have random publications added to my library.
Lastly, I wish there was a “log in with Apple News” feature, or some smarter way that I can read paywalled links I come across that are from publications included in my Apple News subscription. For example, if I see a WSJ article on Twitter, I can’t read it despite it being available to me in Apple News. I have to go and manually search for that article in Apple News to find it. That’s such a horrible user experience. Why not at the very least detect when I click a link like that and redirect me to Apple News, or add an “open in Apple News” share sheet action.Show lessTimmyGUNZ
Text to speech is still painful in its user interface.
I listen to most of the articles that I read. It is a pain to select the text, though it varies from source to source within Apple news. If there was a way to just have the article read, I would very much welcome it. The same problem exists for iBooks, I’m always manually selecting text which is painfully slow. Also, I don’t find anything useful in human narration, I like the robotic voices better as they do not add useless tone and inflection. I would rather provide my own meaning, much as we do when we read a book with our eyes. Human narration brings with it cadence and inflection that gives unwanted filters to the subtle meanings of the writing. When I read a book, I don’t want to hear somebody else’s take on a sentence. On a minor issue, I normally read text at either 1.5 X, or 2X. Sometimes I wish there was a gradation between those two.Show lessEV-traveler
Paid or unpaid, this service needs improvement
UPDATED: a year later - no improvements. Down to one star
The app works fine. But as a paid News+ subscriber, it leaves a lot to be desired. 1. If I block a news source, don’t show it in my feed as “Blocked, see it anyway.’ I clearly don’t want to see it. The main reason I block channels is for poor journalism or misleading headlines (looking at you, USA Today) 2. I’ve used this app for more than a year, and you’d think that if I haven’t clicked on a “Celebrity Scandal” story by now they would stop showing up. This isn’t news, this is clickbait. In general it would be nice to further customize the news feed or at least augment the algorithm. 3. Since I do have a paid subscription, I’d prefer not getting served stories that I can’t access without yet another, outside subscription. Honestly, besides access to a few more articles I’m not sure what the paid subscription gets me. 4. Ads run the world, or at least pay for it. You’d think that as a paid subscriber there would be fewer. I’ve also been looking at the same bad ads for a FinTech company for more than a year. At least make it interesting. I do like the app and read lots of good stories on it. But for at least paid subscribers allowing better customization and fewer ads would make it worth the monthly $. Reading other reviews I see similar complaints.Show lessDowntown.parker
Overall Great, with One Quick Annoyance
I love the concept of having one professional look and easy to use app that I can get the news one instead of needing to shift through a million very poorly made apps or drowning in ads on websites. Also being able to manage all of my subscriptions in one place is all too awesome.
The one criticism I have, however, is the search function. With all of the Heard/Depp news I wanted to dig up her story in the Washington post which I’m subscribed to and logged into within Apple News. A search in Apple News turned up nothing, but a search on Google turned up her essay in the first result. Even when I copied and pasted the exact title of her article it still didn’t show up in Apple News. This is quite annoying to see when trying to get all sides of an issue, and I sincerely hope Apple fixes it as it’s my only real criticism about the app at the moment.Show lessCowboyDiplomacy1
The emperor…
I’m so sick of ads and broken web pages that I replaced Safari with a shortcut to open News instead, but i don’t think the developers of Apple Apps use Apple Apps themselves? If they did, News on iPhone would allow users to get to search from six stories deep without having to force quit or tap back through every article. They also failed to put in an option to find text in the body of an article and News videos don’t rotate to landscape.
Edit: since writing this review the force quit no longer works, so digging the way out of this app to the main page is just tap after tap after tap (or am I’m missing something)Show lessProofreader
Disappointing at least.
Finally caved and signed up for the free trial of News+ and I truly have mixed feelings. Being honest, the app feels very incomplete if you don’t have a News+ subscription because a lot of the “featured” articles require a subscription so you’re constantly plagued with pay walls. Now that I have a subscription it feels more like a complete app but I’m also discovering that a subscription doesn’t unlock all content - for instance, the Washington Post is an additional $5.99/month on its own which just feels very Apple. One in-app purchase is never enough and in-app purchases are a monster that Apple birthed. I wish they would do a better job with videos too - often time for Fox, for example - videos don’t match the story. If they can’t get it together their content should be removed until they can/do. Content curation/display is still an issue too. Outlets you block still show up in featured but it displays a “you chose to block this outlet” box and it’s like yeahhhh so why are you showing me references to it? Mind you that’s valuable space that could be delivering me more curated content that I actually DO care about.Show lessmytw0b1ts
Access to great magazines and a little news
This review is based on the subscription, not free version. For me the real great part is what u actually get. The subscription news I get access to is limited but u do get Wall Street Journal. But you get access to an enormous amount of magazines. Most people would enjoy access to some of these magazines regularly and may already pay for them. you get access to National Geographic, Scientific America, Wired, Popular Science, Forbes, Time and many others. If u don’t care for any of the magazines it’s probably not worth it for u but I’m pretty happy with all the stuff I get to keep up with.
The issues with it are that I don’t really like how it functions and how info it presented. I prefer just using the normal websites over this. And then if I come across a paywall article I can have it open the article in the app instead. Some people say the info in newsfeed is biased to the left. Not really sure cause I still mostly look at my news on the websites unless they improve this app a little moreShow lessMatthewNGBA
What a Joke
I’ve been using another news app that’s not too bad, but I thought I’d see what else might be out there. During my hunt I discovered the Apple News app in my “Seldom Used” folder. Huh. I didn’t remember having it. Moved it out and started busing it. Three days later and it’s got me so pi$$ed off that I’m deleting it. About 90% of the articles I choose to tap on to read come up saying that I need a plus subscription. It doesn’t take long to realize that there’s no news to be found here unless you pay for a subscription. Well folks, don’t make an app available for free unless it at least has some kind of use. Some ads are okay, but the tradeoff has to be a fair one. A free app that serves no purpose except to continuously tell you to subscribe is worthless and leaves a terrible taste. Now I remember why it was in my “Seldom Used” folder. Posting this review and then deleting the Apple News app. Bah, humbug.Show lessNWOhioDave
Awful
It’s not often I have such a negative experience with an Apple app or product but Apple News is amongst the worst news apps on any digital marketplace or website. Content is key for a news app and much of the “news” provided skips over many of the important news stories of the day in favour of celebrity gossip and irrelevant stories with no real way of filtering it or turning it off, countless times have I told the app I don’t want to read stories by a particular news outlet only for it to pay no attention at all and keep sending me celebrity gossip and pointless gossip stories and clickbait. Most of the stories worth reading are locked behind a pay wall with no real way of telling which are and aren’t, I thought mostly articles from known magazines would be a part of Apple news + but current affairs are too when really the most important up to date actual news should be up front and fundemental to the app with all the other stuff being in a separate tab that you can subscribe to. Also, ads, now I understand why they are there in the (far superior Google News) but we pay a premium to Apple for their products and Apple claim they like privacy but these third parties must be getting some info on us.
Avoid at all costsShow lesspussfilledmonkey
