Should Apple News be released for macOS?

There was a great deal of excitement when the Apple News app was first released for iOS. Apple got a ton of media coverage and Apple News quickly became a useful tool for many iOS users.

But is it now time for Apple News to come to macOS?

This question recently came up in a thread on the Apple subreddit, and the folks there didn’t pull any punches in sharing their opinions about it.

I’ll share my thoughts below, but here’s a sample of the comments posted in the Reddit thread:

Wakaawak started the thread with this post:

I just mocked this up and thought it’d be pretty good to see the latest headlines on my computer.

I love the app as a news aggregator, but my iPhone isn’t necessarily always my favourite method of consuming the news.

Thoughts?

More at Reddit

His fellow redditors responded with their thoughts about Apple News coming to macOS:

HugOfThunder: “First I’d like to see Apple News launch in Canada officially. (Yes I know that if I change my regional settings to the US or U.K. It will show up, but that’s a hack and doesn’t provide Canadian news sources)”

Bedermanben: “I would love to have the News app on my MacBook. I start off every morning on my iPad before I go to work reading through headlines and such. Best part about it of course is that you get to choose what you’d like to see. Not that it’s a new feature to the world I just like to way the app works and the simplicity of it. Get the information I want and move on from there. And since I don’t really use my iPad at work for 10 hours, it would be nice to not have to view it on my phone on lunch. I have my MacBook out all day, why carry it across all platforms in the Apple Eco System.”

Wildrotar1: “YES. Also TV.

Both of these are selling points for the iPad. Not even considering development costs, they’d almost definitely lose money by creating News for MacOS in lost sales for iPad.”

Lilillilill: “This won’t happen because publishers want you to visit their website on your desktop/laptop and not use a 3rd party app.”

Archiveile7: “I’m pretty sure the publishers would rather you use their own app than a desktop where ads could be blocked…since most everything has their own app nowadays. ”

Mrevergood: “Looks good.

And yeah, I’d be down for that.

It’s a really nice news aggregator, and I don’t understand why we can’t have iOS features like this on macOS without people flipping out.”

Zmasta94: “Not a fan of the news app in its current state. Needs a lot of improving and refinement before they should even think about porting it over to macOS.”

YoureNotFleens: “Personally, I don’t find Apple News to be all that great. Whenever I open the apple news app, the news stories are always old articles, whereas if I use the news organization’s website or app, the articles shown are all recently published.”

Stoogotz: “I would love for Apple News to come to macOS. I feel that Windows 10 is so much better in this respect. It just gives you a feel of the outside world straight from your desktop. I need my daily dose of propaganda.”

Ranessin: “No, Reeder/RSS is giving me all I need without some company curating the news in a way that’s not the way I want them.”

More at Reddit

I gave up on Apple News a long time ago

While I can appreciate the enthusiasm that some iOS users have for Apple News, I don’t share it. In fact, I gave up on Apple News a long time ago and dumped the app into a folder that I use for official iOS apps that I can’t delete. There it sits to this day and I very rarely bother to open it to check out changes in the app.

I was initially quite interested in Apple News, but I quickly realized that it was nothing more than a crippled RSS reader. I also found that some of the curated stories lean very far to the left politically, and that didn’t work for me as my politics tilt to the libertarian right.

So I can’t say that I’m excited about Apple News someday possibly coming to macOS. Why would I bother with it when I can download and install a good RSS reader app that gives me much more freedom in terms of the content I want to see? Just do a search for “rss reader” in the Mac App Store and you’ll find plenty of good apps to use right now for all of your news needs.

Don’t get me wrong here, if Apple News works for you on iOS then I can understand why you might be interested in a version of it for the Mac. But I can’t see that a Mac version would be much different than the iOS app that I have little use for on my iPhone and iPad.

This is all a bit of a moot point right now anyway. So far there has been no credible indication that Apple is going to release a version of Apple News for macOS. But if the company does release it, I probably won’t bother to install Apple News on my iMac.

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