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Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

mjtsai.com

171–180 of 271 posts

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is literally nothing which makes iMessage unique in this regard. Except for the vendor lock-in, which makes this a problem to begin with. Other services work on a majority of devices.

Then your complaint is about Apple locking iMessage to Apple devices. Which is a legitimate complaint especially since Apple had said they would be opening it up (or was that FaceTime...I'm not sure). But that's a wholly different complaint from the fact that Apple, like nearly every other messaging service, does not allow you to export groups to other services.

Apple was going to make the peer-to-peer video call technology they were using for FaceTime public. Then they got sued by VirnetX over a patent related to that technology, so they had to rework the service to run through a central server. With that change, there was no longer anything worth open-sourcing.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#172
post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 de…

AFAIU on iOS there are two types of deep linking. 1) Universal Links, which allow owners of domains to launch an app instead of Safari. For example, you might own the domain myawesomeapp.com, and therefore can redirect urls to e.g. myawesomeapp.com/do_things to launch your app. 2) Protocol links, these are completely locked down by iOS and there is no way to subvert them. For example, mailto links always open the mail app.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#173
post #118

The title doesn’t accurately reflect what’s going on here. Apple News hasn’t supported users adding their own feeds for a number of years. This article is about how publishers get their feeds into Apple News. Apple now requires publishers to provide a custom feed format rather than an RSS feed.

That's exactly how I read it.

I cannot recall ever seeing Apple promoting non-ANF format, and publishers who used RSS instead of ANF were not permitted to get analytics on their product... so I guess it was just a matter of time.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Apple actually recanted and removed the special rule they had added to make those apps violate the TOS. Their review process didn't enforce that rule for years until after Apple started competing, then the apps were suddenly "abusive" but it was actually platform abuse all along.

> The company estimated that Apple’s move cost it around $3 million, a spokeswoman told the Times.

https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/04/with-antitrust-investigati...

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not a position you're put into with WhatsApp or any other app. Sure it is! You can't continue a group conversation from WhatsApp -- or any other messenger, really -- on another messenger service without manually recreating the group. There is literally nothing which makes iMessage unique in this regard.

> There is literally nothing which makes iMessage unique in this regard. Sure there is. If you try to "text" someone (as in SMS) and the Messages app (which is the ONLY way you can send SMS on iOS) detects your number as registered to iMessage, it will send an iMessage by default. So even though your number didn't change, and everyone is still using the "Messages" app to talk to you, it inexplicably doesn't work anym…

What really sucks is that it means iPhone Signal isn't a transparent drop-in replacement for the sms app like it is on Android, meaning I can never get iphone-having contacts to use it.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#178
post #137

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…

It's reasonable when it's your own custom protocol, but it's a very different story for an open one that has multiple clients.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

File extensions are the de facto type indicator on all platforms, not just Windows. Even when the FS has some other way to specify the type (e.g. a separate MIME type metadata field), the extension still normally sets the default value for that.

This is orthogonal to all that, though. It's about the UX to associate an app with a file type, regardless of how that file type is determined.

Re: Apple News No Longer Supports RSS

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then your complaint is about Apple locking iMessage to Apple devices. Which is a legitimate complaint especially since Apple had said they would be opening it up (or was that FaceTime...I'm not sure). But that's a wholly different complaint from the fact that Apple, like nearly every other messaging service, does not allow you to export groups to other services.

Apple was going to make the peer-to-peer video call technology they were using for FaceTime public. Then they got sued by VirnetX over a patent related to that technology, so they had to rework the service to run through a central server. With that change, there was no longer anything worth open-sourcing.

It's open and federated protocol, not open source, that everybody else wants from them.
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