Apple News had decent headlines and nice push notifications. It redirected to Safari, which has several ad blockers at my phone. It suddenly stopped working in my country.
I thought: “Google News can’t be that bad, right?”
It was. Let me count the ways:
Google news has 3 viewing modes: gruesome, bad and lousy.
The first one is the native viewer which is 70% ads by screen surface. Sometimes these ads even float before your content, which I had not seen in 10 years. This the gruesome option, and by default you start here.
“Open in browser” does nothing of the sort and now navigation is broken. You can’t get back to any list or other story but you are still be flooded with ads: the bad option. From here you can press the tiny Safari symbol to:
Read the story in Safari, which works great but now you have completely left Google news, which is lousy.
Some more bad stuff:
- no way to copy the headline to read it outside the app
- links to paywalled content
- screen gets funky when clicking paywalled links: the moving barrier covers the back button so you have to restart the app
- no way to rank anything or to block certain sports, say
- completely obscure navigation: the back button is an “X” and can appear on top or on the bottom of the page
- sometimes headlines “fold out” with only vaguely related headlines, unclear why
- no memory of cookies: very hard to login to newspaper sites even if you have a subscription in gruesome an bad mode
- if it works, it has forgotten everything when you open the app again
- in lousy mode, Safari is tricked that you don’t have a subscription even if you are currently logged in, which requires reloading other tabs for the same paper
and I thought Apple News was bad.
