I hesitate to bring up the oft-repeated stereotype of Apple not being good at things like machine learning, but it is inevitable. In News, the job of recommending stories is done by machine learning algorithms, although Apple has also been hiring journalists, likely to augment the algorithms in picking stories to feature on the For You timeline. Unlike music, news is published much more rapidly and is typically relevant for just a few hours or days. It’s an undeniably ambitious goal that Apple has set for itself. In another feature reminiscent of Apple Music, News has a For You section which tries to recommend stories for you to read. I do not know the reason why, but my guess is that it is related to Apple wanting to adjust its algorithms to ensure that News is recommending articles that are relevant to you (particularly when it comes to domestic politics and sports). It baffles me why Apple would want to restrict a supposedly tentpole feature of iOS 9 (including an extensive demo on stage at WWDC) to just one country (or even three) at launch. If you still want to try News, and you live outside the US, there is a quick and relatively easy workaround to get it and iMore has the details. This is despite the fact that at WWDC Apple gave the impression that News would be available in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia at launch:Ĭraig Federighi: We’ll be rolling out News starting in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia. Whilst there are aspects of great execution in some limited areas, huge aspects of News seem half-baked and confused.Ĭurrently, News is limited to just those in the United States. The high hopes that I had for the News app have unfortunately been (mostly) dashed. Much like Apple’s past experiments in bringing news to iOS, 1 the News app in iOS 9 fails to live up to its potential. News, as it was demoed at WWDC, offered a promising alternative: a one-stop app that would deliver “the articles you want to read in a beautiful and uncluttered format, while respecting your privacy”. The experience is even worse with many news websites which chew massive amounts of data and obscure the small display with a myriad of annoying ads. I was excited about the News app because reading news on an iPhone, although it has improved over time, can still be a frustrating experience jumping from app to app. The News app was, to me at least, one of the features of iOS 9 that I was most looking forward to using – I even put that in writing.
One way to think of News is a fusion of Google News (for the recommended articles), Flipboard (for the ability to follow publishers and topics), and Facebook’s Instant Articles (custom, gorgeous articles on mobile). As you would expect from the name, News is, or at least tries to be, a one-stop shop for all your news needs. Apple occasionally introduces new apps to iOS that come preinstalled on every device, and with iOS 9 they’ve done this again with the introduction of News.
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