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Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

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Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#161

Post by Nightshaxx »

ljm wrote: post #137
erikpukinskis wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's hijacking of links, addresses, etc, is possibly their top abuse of power. The other possible top abuse is the way they block you in your group messages if you switch from iPhone to Android.

I'm not convinced it's an abuse of power; it's a feature any developer can take advantage of. Your apps get their own protocol, so you can deep-link into one using a URI. But you can also register them to open certain contents natively. I'm not sure how it works, maybe there's some metadata in the HTML. You can see the same thing in action with the Jira app on Cataline now - any Jira link you click will load up and r…

In Android, an App's manifest designates which deep links it can handle. Then when the user clicks on a link, it gives the user the option of which app to use when there are multiple apps that can handle it.

Maybe since at one point you did tell it you want to use news to handle it, it keeps going back to it? Although that means most likely the News app was not updated to remove support for that link. Or maybe iOS deep links work differently? (I only use Android)

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#162

Post by pseudalopex »

benologist wrote: post #140
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was in fact a policy very early in the iOS app store's history. Not for a long time though.

It's still in effect and the most recent example would be banning software monitoring usage after Apple replicated the functionality themselves. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/04/27/tech/apple-screen-time-ap...

Apple replicated the functionality so they could crack down on third parties abusing enterprise device management.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#163

Post by londons_explore »

catalogia wrote: post #153
reaperducer wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME, the thumbs don't do anything. The only way to have a real affect on your news feed is to block channels. For example, I follow the Chicago Sun-Times. And every day Apple News shows me the Sun-Times horoscope. And every day I give it a thumb's down. Every. Single. Day. 400+ thumbs later, it still shows up every day.

What a waste. It would be trivial (and effective!) to simply implement a bayesian "spam" filter that operates on the text of headlines to promote or demote headlines according to user rankings. This could be done completely on-device with utterly negligible power draw.

This is exactly how it works.

Yet 400 boolean data points is nowhere near enough data for any kind of learning system to get anywhere. And without the cloud to aggregate data from millions of other users, it'll never become great.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#164

Post by londons_explore »

jauke wrote: post #113
jbigelow76 wrote: post #97

I'm not surprised to hear this considering what an out-of-gate unquestionable home run Apple News has been.I mean, it's been such monster success that Apple knows even its dumpster fire of a UX and god awful search functionality aren't enough to keep away the literal dozens of users it has. With no where else to turn for news the Apple faithful will just have to accept that Apple's decision to not support RSS really…

85 million monthly active users according to Apple.

85 million people too lazy to hunt out another news app, or just aimlessly opening apps on their phone when bored.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#165

Post by bathtub365 »

Gaelan wrote: post #111
bathtub365 wrote: post #56

Has there been any confirmation that this isn’t just a bug? It wasn’t clear from the post.

That was my reaction too. I'd expect that if it was intentional, they would have gotten rid of the URL handler.

Exactly, when Apple deprecates something they at least either communicate it properly or handle it elegantly (in my experience at least).

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#166

Post by catalogia »

londons_explore wrote: post #163
catalogia wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a waste. It would be trivial (and effective!) to simply implement a bayesian "spam" filter that operates on the text of headlines to promote or demote headlines according to user rankings. This could be done completely on-device with utterly negligible power draw.

This is exactly how it works. Yet 400 boolean data points is nowhere near enough data for any kind of learning system to get anywhere. And without the cloud to aggregate data from millions of other users, it'll never become great.

From personal experience with a HN headline scraping IRC bot I wrote a few years ago, 400 labelled headlines is more than sufficient to get pretty good results. The threshold of usefulness should be closer to a few dozen rankings.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#167

Post by blotter_paper »

kevinyew wrote: post #154
blotter_paper wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had an old Galaxy S6 Active sitting around, so I just did a factory reset and didn't sign into any accounts. I opened Chrome and searched for "keyboard cat" using the URL bar. I tapped on the first result, and it opened the YouTube app without any user prompt from Chrome. This is on Android 6.0.1, and I'll give you that this could theoretically be a Samsung specific modification, but that doesn't seem like the simp…

It's likely that it already had that default association set up out of the box. If you open up the system App Info screen for YouTube, you should see a section that says "Set as default", and when you open that, it shows you which URLs it hijacks under "Supported web addresses", but in that same screen there should be a "Go to supported URLs" option, where you can choose "In this app", "Ask every time", or "In other…

My original claim (which DocG disputed) was that clicking on a YouTube link launches the app by default, without asking the user. "By default" implies that this can be changed.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#168

Post by jauke »

stevenicr wrote: post #138
jauke wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I consume most content via RSS. It certainly doesn’t feel dead to me. There are ways to get Facebook, Instagram and Twitter content into RSS too if that’s what you need.

I am interested in getting these three as rss feeds, not that I use them very much, much getting them into a reader would help others very much. a quick search shows some things saying public pages can be made RSS, but nothing like a bot that can suck in what your wall or whatever would be and push it into a feed that can be read otherwise. Here's to hoping the twitter open api thing and the few stories about portabl…

I use RSS Bridge. You can host it yourself, which is probably better, or use a public instance.

https://github.com/RSS-Bridge/rss-bridge/blob/master/README....

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#169

Post by catach »

fredthomsen wrote: post #26
kgwxd wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love newsbeuter, it's how I get all latest news about the death of RSS :)

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.

In terms of most blogs still having RSS, I suspect that's primarily due to default software settings.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#170

Post by delusional »

whiskeykilo wrote: post #126
codetrotter wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note that macOS has two different kinds of default application associations. The first one, the one that you might expect to apply to all files of the same kind, but which actually applies only to the specific file you are doing this for, is under “Open With” in the context menu that comes up when you right click the file (two finger touch by default on MacBook laptops). When you choose Open With > Other and check th…

As someone who grew up on Windows when I initially started working on a Mac daily this drove me absolutely nuts. It could be worded much better. The way Finder sets the default view is equally unintuitive

The concept of file extensions on windows is equally unintuitive (why is the type 9f.file dictated by what comes after a dot). It's just a question of what you're used to.
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