Apple News was already flakey and unreliable in the sources (websites) it would allow to be added. With its highly limited geographical availability (years after launching) and its problematic focus on News+, I switched back to a plain RSS Reader to follow specific sites.
Apple News seems like a niche product with hardly any technical effort put into it. In comparison, Google News, with its ads, generally looks like a more comprehensive choice for news. Not to mention it’s also “free” (of course, it never allowed, AFAIK, adding RSS feeds from any site).
I was under the impression that Google News didn't have ads. At least I can't recall ever seeing ads on the news.google.com site (the Google Feed on Android is another story, that thing is riddled with ads now).
There are no ads on Google News and I think it would be hard for Google to monetize other news organizations' content in their own news app without being sued for it.
It's been around since 2015. It shouldn't take 6+ years for a news aggregator app to become pretty competent. With its current model, it's already lost a lot of momentum (I don't know anyone that uses it) and will just continue to lose it, especially since its not a "necessary" utility or has as little competition as a maps/navigation app. In my opinion, it's more likely to be abandoned or maybe even transitioned into something else as Newsstand did when it became News than for it to become successful, especially since Apple is moving more and more to services.
Apple Maps is still pretty far behind Google Maps.
I don't have high hopes for News, given how much it keeps pushing features that are either user-unfriendly (giant ads in the middle of articles) or designed solely to push you to News+
I used to be a regular (many times a day) user and their changes have led me to stop using it entirely.
> Apple Maps is still pretty far behind Google Maps.
Both fall well short of OSM for topics other than finding local businesses. OSM gives me incredible detail, even telling me where water fountains and benches are in the local park. Meanwhile Google Maps doesn't even recognize the restricted access road running through the park, let alone any of the walking trails, let alone any water fountains, benches, etc.
If you can't drive a car on it or through it or to it, Google thinks it may as well not exist.
> If you can't drive a car on it or through it or to it, Google thinks it may as well not exist.
That may seem to be true some places, but I've seen many places (including around my house) where Google has great coverage of nameless walking and biking trails that aren't open to cars.
Have you compared Google's and OSM's maps of those locations side by side? I wager OSM has much more detail. This is the case even for public parks located in the middle of major American west coast cities (where I would expect Google to have good coverage, if they had it anywhere.)
Google has gotten better in recent years, it now has a few of the walking trails, but compared to OSM it's still absolutely pitiful. Even in high profile locations like Yellowstone National Park, Google Maps is pitiful compared to OSM:
The love/hate thing is that it picks a more normal route vs optimized. I personally like it because I don’t find that a Google Maps optimizations help in urban settings.
doesn't matter if it is half done or not as feature complete as other sites, it just is the default on an iPad so people like my parents end up using it because Apple makes sure to highlight it being added.
so for those who did not consider looking for a source of news and one just appears it pretty much is a lock. the local newspaper (AJC) has their own app but its not great and worse when sending links they don't format to the device opening it; comics are the worst as half the frames are missing
I use a terminal RSS reader called newsboat[1][2], which is an actively developed fork of newsbeuter.
It's pretty feature rich, fast, keyboard-oriented (supporting vi movement keys), and works great in the terminal.
Another great thing about it is that it runs completely on my own machine, so I don't have to give away information about my reading preferences to any third party, as would be the case for any hosted RSS service.
I love RSS because it gives me lean, fast, ad-free, bloat-free information. I hope it never dies.
Feels like there has been a bit of a resurgence lately, not that I have any hard data to back that up. The major players ie google and now apple have dumped it, but most blogs and news sites still have rss feeds.
When I follow a site via RSS, I go out of my way to reach out to the owner and let them know I am enjoying their content via RSS.
If I site I want to follow doesn't have RSS, I reach out and let the owner know I can't follow their site via RSS. A few people implemented RSS on their blogs because of it :)
It has always been a "people's choice" sort of thing, a least for a certain slice of "people".
Large media outfits tend to hate RSS because it puts curation in the hands of users, and that curation function is what a lot of people will pay a lot of money to influence.
Smaller media outfits like it, because they can find readers without paying money to influence the large gatekeepers.
As blogging has "matured", the big shops are feeling more confident that they can lock folks back in to their curation.
Ironically its the large media outlets that usually have categorical and comprehensive rss feeds, presumably by virtue of being around during the peak google reader years when rss was expected and not bothering with purging the functionality.
It's the upstart outlets that I notice not having RSS at all, with a twitter handle in its place. Pass for me.
Definitely. If a comic doesn't have an RSS feed, I won't keep up with it. It isn't worth keeping track of the different update schedules and platforms.
Though I'd very much prefer a linebreak between index listings as a bit of contextual segregation / clausterphobia breaking.
I also find search ... nonintuitive.
Though on balance, it's pretty slick.
By the original newsbeuter author, rsstail and multitail are also damned slick. I've got an rsstail script (with a lot of pretification / scrubbing of the feed streams) that runs as an xrootconsole window on my desktop, alternating amongst various feeds.
Since this seems to be the thread where everyone mentions the RSS feed reader they use/write, I'll share Brook. It's a very minimal feed reader that gives you what you need and gets out of the way.
You can use it in Firefox right now, and if anyone is interested, I'll port it to Chrome. Honestly I wrote it because my old favorite feed reader Sage wasn't supported after Firefox switched to the web extensions standards.
Give it a peek if you either want to see how it works, or you just want a simple way to browse your favorite sites in your browser.
(Okay, now let's get back to the regularly scheduled outrage around the decline of RSS and maybe mention how Google doesn't support its products anymore ;) )
Just going to pimp https://theoldreader.com/ which mimics the old Google Reader UI down to the shortcuts. I don't think I could live without it and gladly pay my yearly membership for the premium version even if I don't actually need it.
Just sends the latest articles to an IMAP folder. I can use any device that syncs to my email (currently using the built in ActiveSync client on Android), and can access it from webmail, and via Thunderbird on Linux.
Not the OP, but I've never found anything faster than the Livemarks plugin for quickly scanning headlines from all of your favorite sites with a quick mouseover in your browser's bookmark toolbar.
Livemarks (or the Chrome/Vivaldi equivalent 'Foxish live RSS') was released after Firefox killed off their Live Bookmarks feature a year or so ago.
I use Reeder 3 on iOS and NetNewsWire on Mac. NetNewsWire is a free and open source RSS reader. An iOS version (also free) is coming in the first quarter of 2020.
Apple News seems like a niche product with hardly any technical effort put into it. In comparison, Google News, with its ads, generally looks like a more comprehensive choice for news. Not to mention it’s also “free” (of course, it never allowed, AFAIK, adding RSS feeds from any site).