Apple News Remains a Bad Citizen of the Open Web ⇥ mjtsai.com
Michael Tsai, commenting in relation to the “tyranny of apps” article:
I think Apple News would have a better user experience with a Web site and an RSS feed than as an app.
I agree, but I think it is a worse situation than that suggests. Apple News is not only a mediocre app experience, but its existence also causes regressions on the open web.
Stories in Apple News have a permalink, like anything else on the web. However, unlike just about any link you have seen from a mainstream publication for the past, say, twenty years, these links are inscrutable. Instead of being in a format containing the source of an article and its title, all Apple News permalinks are something like https://apple.news/Ayls8UZCzQnWfFNRugL3tPA.
That is not only gross, it is also unhelpful. Sometimes, but not always, links like these display a page containing nothing but the following:
Open this story in Apple News.
For the best reading experience, open this story on a device with Apple News. It may also be available on the publisher’s website.
There is no link to the article — certainly not on the publisher’s website, but also not even on Apple News. In MacOS browsers, I am prompted to open Apple News to view the article; if I decline, I have no next steps.
There is scant indication of what article this is. The <title> element of the page shows the article’s headline, but the publisher is not visible. (It is, however, contained in the page’s markup, along with a description of the article.) This is true no matter which user agent I use. I tried it with a couple of automated webpage testing tools and got the exact same page.
This article is, of course, also available on the web. I chose it essentially by chance from plentiful options. Apple could make next steps visible on this page, but it does not, and never has since Apple News launched ten years ago this September.