Apple News 12+

With all due respect, you can do way better with this app. There should be zero advertisements. If I thumbs down or dismiss a news source / story, don’t show me “you’ve blocked this” as a placeholder from a news source I’ve blocked. If I thumbs down an article, I don’t want to see anything associated with that article / topic / subject.

Notifications are random and don’t notify me of breaking news from sources I follow. I think because I’ve disabled the setting on my iPhones system settings that allows me to see news from my sources only, it has hindered the apps ability to give me notifications.

There are many complaints here saying pretty much the same things as me. No idea why you don’t address the above? Apple sees itself at the pinnacle of hardware development and most first party apps are unparalleled. This first party news app mirrors that of other low quality, ad infested apps that are here on the App Store.

This app is so frustrating. The suggest more or less (thumbs up and down) do nothing, pretty much half of everything is behind paywall these days (even things that aren’t behind paywall on a web browser) if I block a publication, its stories still appear (just without the picture), and, to top it all off, when I do use the thumbs down, block or scroll past things I’m not interested in, they persist in the line up for days, weeks, sometimes even months, so I continuously have to keep scrolling by them. I’ve put up with this for so long because I liked the simple interface better than alternatives I’d tried before, like Flipboard or News360, but recently I’ve started searching for alternatives again.

Funnily enough, last weekend my husband was web browsing next to me and I looked over to see what he was up to; his search was for “Apple News Alternatives”. Neither one of us had mentioned to the other how annoying we’d been finding it yet, but we’d obviously been feeling the same way.

We know Apple could fix the problems with the app, but they don’t seem to have the desire—it feels like they are more interested in the publications and advertisers that pay them to be in Apple News than their customers’ user experience. It seems they’re so confident in their standing that they don’t realise customer satisfaction still matters.

Infected with ads even if you subscribe to News+. No ability to order topics in any meaningful way - no facility for breaking news or headline news from preferred sources. Even when blocking unwanted sources, the news feed still gets populated with stories I have no interest in from sources I don’t want. If you block a source, in Top Stories it will leave a black square telling you the story is blocked - and would I like to see it anyway? Baffling. Also mixing news items with magazine articles and pushing News+ articles everywhere interspersed with ads makes for a chaotic mess of irrelevant articles.

The whole thing is disorganised and confusing. The bottom line is that if you spend five minutes with the app, the chances are you won’t be sure that you have been served the main stories of the day, some stories will be repeated but from different sources, you’ll have no idea which stories are more significant than others, and when there are relevant articles they are buried amongst a pile of stories you aren’t interested in from sources you don’t want to see.

There are other News apps out there that do this so much better. Give me curated headlines from sources I explicitly specify, have them in some kind of order, don’t repeat news items and keep the interface clear from clutter, ads and irrelevant topics. It shouldn’t be that hard……