
Apple News+ in iOS 14 opens articles in Apple News, intercepting website traffic - fireball_blaze
https://www.macrumors.com/2020/08/10/apple-news-plus-ios-14-web-links/
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kn0where
A while back, my mom was sending me links to Apple News articles. I had
deleted[0] the app from my phone, and tapping the links wouldn’t let me read
the stories in the browser because it knew I was on an iPhone. Instead, it
tried to open in the app, and popped up a system dialog saying I had to
reinstall Apple News. Truly aggravating.

[0]Preinstalled iOS apps you delete are actually just hidden and disabled
until you “reinstall” from the App Store

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oramge
Tapping on links from some publishers opens the article up in the Apple News
app in iOS 13 as well. What’s new and noteworthy here is that apparently iOS
14 includes an option to disable that behavior, whereas in iOS 13 the only way
to open those links in Safari is to long press the link and opening it in the
background.

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m463
All web links go through some form of interception.

Deep linking allows web links registered with apps can be monitored or
intercepted by the apps.

(wondering why amazon links open up in the amazon app?)

Links pasted into messages will be intercepted and a link preview is loaded.

You can kind of prevent this is by putting the link in angle brackets like
<[https://example.com>](https://example.com>)

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akssoni
So Apple is really against the free and easy web access via browser. They lost
browser war to Chrome and this is their revenge imo. Nothing is wrong from
Apple's perspective - they really do a lot of hard work on their hardware
devices and they don't want to end Apple's success story like other hardware
businesses

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acdha
The screenshot’s help text suggests an explanation which makes more sense than
the speculation: if the site has a paywall and you subscribe through Apple
News+, this populates the embedded web view’s cookies so you don’t get hit the
paywall. It can’t do that to the system Safari any more than any other app but
it can for an internal app.

If their goal was intercepting traffic it wouldn’t require a subscription.

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wombatmobile
How does this work (I don't use Apple News)?

Are the news stories scraped by Apple and republished from apple.com, or do
some news authors give permission to Apple to republish articles from Apple's
platform?

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kn0where
The latter. Although I believe Apple News can also (poorly) read RSS feeds.

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benrapscallion
Not anymore.

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dave_aiello
Apple News+ is a subscription service which provides access to a lot of
different publications, some of which have their own paywalls.

I subscribe to Apple News+ and like it, although I think there are a number of
usability issues.

One is that I would like to be able to quickly search for the Apple News
version of a story based on a headline I find on the web. This would be in
order to avoid having to register with every publisher who is trying to drive
me into subscribing by limiting free access to articles.

In those cases, I'd like for the publishers to be compensated based on the
payments I already send Apple.

The problem is that the search function inside the Apple News app doesn't
appear to be one of the app's major features. I would really like to see this
capability strengthened.

