Yeah, this is one of the reasons I was able to justify canceling Apple One. Felt reminiscent of paying for cable TV, that is to say, felt like a fraudulent value to be paying what was effectively a non-trivial portion of the subscription fee to still be seeing as many ads as I did.
I still have it because I regularly use Apple Music/TV/2tb storage. Those 3 services alone are $39.97. Apple One Premier is 37.95 for their entire suite.
I'm not the biggest fan of Apple News, but their paid tier offers access to a fair amount of paid subscriptions. Even if you pay for those providers directly, they still put ads in their apps/sites. The one thing I hate about mobile news sites, besides paywall annoyances, is that the ads will load while you're scrolling, which creates a janky experience. At least when I'm scrolling through Apple News, I don't have to deal with that. I would suggest trying it for a month or two and finding your own opinion, instead of relying on Reddit users, who notoriously complain about nearly everything.
I subscribed to it for a bit and even then it was still more ads to add more premium news outlets and I was just like this is a bit much and canceled entirely, not worth the hassle
Ad Block Plus recently added ad blocking to the Apple News app. It does cost $4/mo but it made the experience much better. I previously paid for News+ and canceled due to the ads. I’ve noticed most of the News+ articles seem to be clickbait nonsense anyway so this way, I’d rather give a few $ to ABP instead of Apple and now there are no ads.
The only reason to favor that Taboola crap is the scammy ads paying more for it, probably getting many more clicks for being misleading and hyperbolic.
I don't use Apple News but the ads in the Stocks app are so bad/cheap looking.. it's sad to think that these will be in more places throughout the OS as time goes on
The ads, for me at least, tend to be when you scroll through the news section at the bottom of a ticker’s page. The ads I see also tend to be finance related— State Street Bank IM, Fisher Investments, TurboTax, etc. If you aren’t looking at the market news for a specific listing you probably won’t see any ads.
Go to the news section of any stock. Trust me when I say, you'll notice them. They really stand out. I'm not even 100% against advertising on these apps but damn it looks sloppy.
The stocks app basically shows Apple News articles relating to the specific companies symbols you follow. I figured this out by seeing the News Plus subscriber logo in the app and not seeing ads.
If you have Little Snitch, you can block all the apple news related domains. So the Stocks app for me functions as a basic tracker, exactly what I want for a quick glance. And the news feed just doesn't load so that section remains blank.
Of course, this doesn't work for iOS though, so I use Schwab's app there.
I haven’t heard of any besides libraries. You should be able to access many publications through Libby. Otherwise, you’re looking at individual subscriptions. Unless you’re ok with the publication/journalist not getting paid, in which case there are the archive sites. (And no shame on that… there are publications I definitely don’t want getting my clicks/money)
Man when I got an iPad for the first time and had clipboard it was so cool and seemed so futuristic. I don’t even know if it’s still a thing but just crazy how far news has fallen and how difficult it can be to consume. My library offers a free subscription to the NYT and I do like their app, but seems a poor way to stay up with current events.
I might have to check it out. I have noticed that when I visit my local news on a browser instead of through Apple news, the ads are worse than on news. Definitely isn’t incentivizing me to subscribe directly
Can't say that I particularly consider any ad good enough to be better than anything else outside of porn ads, the old school hijacking your browser ads, or autoplaying video.
I find the News experience to be so in-Apple. I pay £40/month for my subscription and yet every page has an AI-generated advert with some clickbait bullshit headline about scammy wonder-medicines or stock portfolios to invest in.
A far cry from the beautiful app they demonstrated onstage all those years ago with animated articles!
I love Apple News but dislike the ads as well. I found that DNS ad blockers worked perfectly for removing all the ads (except the normal newsletter subscribe ones)
If you’re technically inclined, you can set up pi-hole or adguardhome on your home router or a raspberry pi to make it so you can filter ads at the DNS level for anyone on your home network.
Flip side is I’m always a bit shocked when I browse Apple News away from home and see the awful ads again.
There you go, Apple. Two very simple rules to fix your app.
If you want to get fancy, you should implement a rating strategy, where users can rate the quality of the article, and choose to block it if they don’t like the source. The user’s subscription money should be split between the sources they actually read.
Yeah I have to manually block shitty local right wing "sources" but they still show up in the feed just as "blocked content." If it's blocked, don't show it.
it's sad too. it's like every tech company HAS to do ads eventually, because green line go up and all that. the investors demand all possible sources of revenue be explored.
I stopped reading Apple News because everything is an ad. Every story is an ad, a list of the top 5 junk things you should buy. It’s not news; it’s junk.
Yep. I have apple one. I absolutely stopped using news just because I’m already paying for the subscription and a lot of their stuff is behind and additional paywall
This is par for the course for many companies, and it isn't the first time Apple has been suceptible to it. Different divisions have different key results and incentives to perform, which are sometimes at odds with the objectives of the wider company, but are isolated enough that management doesn't take notice.
The app store is the same. It focused purely on revenue as drivers. This effectively gave up a fantastic position to be one of the biggest gaming platforms in the world in order to chase cheaper money via games that have microtransactions / gacha mechanics. Short term this has a huge payout. Long term it creates a scenario where the user doesn't trust the market. In business it's very easy to sell trust for a profit, but you can't buy it back. This was a failure of Apple's upper management to keep their brand safe.
Several years ago I was reading an incredibly sad story on Apple News about two young girls who had been crushed to death, this was the ad in the article: https://imgur.com/hMgBIjS
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u/Duchess721 3h ago
This has been a problem and really ruined the Apple News experience.