Apple News 12+

I really like the UI, the organisation and the simplicity. It’s a very pretty app and the best news app in that regard. For actually what matters though, News curation, you know the one thing this app is made for, is dreadful. It’s so bad it’s almost as if the buttons you press purposely do nothing. No matter how many times you press thumbs down for the things you are not interested in they will always be there. I have never read NME in my life, so why do I get a big feature that includes nothing but NME articles under the banner, ‘For You: Recommendations Based On What You Read’ like huh? There is no option to get rid of this.

Also, much of the content I see is under ‘Suggested by Siri’ with a prompt to follow that content. Except if I wanted to follow it I would’ve done so on setup or the 90th you asked me. The ‘stop suggesting’ button does literally nothing in this case.

Finally, when you block a channel, it will still show them but greyed out. There’s a reason I don’t want to see triggering articles. You would think a trillion dollar company could figure out how to exclude these articles or outlets from the feed altogether.

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……

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 costs