Apple News Publisher Sign-in Required ⇥ mjtsai.com

Now that it has been a couple of years since Apple began requiring administrators to sign in to the News Publisher dashboard or risk their accounts losing their role, there are a few things we have learned:

  1. These notifications arrive on an approximately five-month schedule, perhaps a couple of weeks longer.

  2. News Publisher has little additional functionality that requires or would encourage signing in on a more regular basis if you do not use Apple’s special format.

    In my case, I cannot even see the articles I have published, nor are there analytics. I checked on a device that is not my own and I can see that recent articles are broadcasting to Apple News just fine from my website, but there is effectively nothing in News Publisher reflecting that.

  3. Apple News is still frighteningly limited from a publisher’s perspective. It launched eleven years ago and there is still no way to set a custom URL in News Publisher or, in fact, anywhere. That is, this website’s Apple News link is https://apple.news/TAjcS0c5sRV2HYftzmJ6UMQ instead of, say, https://apple.news/pixel-envy. It is not a function of size, either — here are the URL slugs of a few publishers you definitely recognize: ThfiauYLtQlOfqyiHkempkw, TVKIb0N6iSsOyGSnR4zF1Kw, and TUKgA_OjuTe20v1ndDwQjxQ. Catchy.

    This limitation also extends to the URLs of individual stories. It is the kind of basic functionality that exists on every other public-facing platform I can think of that a publisher might use, but Apple does not support because its “Services” business prints money anyway.

I still do not know what happens if I fail to sign into News Publisher five months from now, other than that my role becomes reduced to an editor. There is nobody else authorized with News Publisher, so I guess I simply lose administrator access forever if, every five months, I complete the necessary busywork of signing in.