“When Time Inc. CEO Joe Ripp expressed frustration with his company’s performance on Apple News last week, his complaints apparently were just the tip of the iceberg,” Lucia Moses reports for Digiday. “Other publishing execs are unhappy about everything from the traffic they’re getting from the two-month-old news aggregation app to the user experience to the data Apple’s giving them.”
“As one publisher, who like others wouldn’t talk on the record for fear of jeopardizing their relationship with Apple, said, ‘The traffic is underwhelming,'” Moses reports. “Data is also a sticking point. Apple is providing weekly data reports including basics like the volume of page views and shares, but publishers want a dashboard that they can use to analyze data on demand, and more demographic data on users. To appeal to publishers, Apple was supposed to let them count the views toward their traffic and let publishers sell ads into the app. But publishers said Apple has been delayed in adding measurement firm comScore tags to the content.”
“There are execution issues, too. There are more than 70 publishers in the app, but only a few get featured at a time on the app’s promotional screen, so some could be getting a big traffic advantage over others,” Moses reports. “There are kinks in the user experience, too. Apple hasn’t provided ways to promote individual stories so they’re not all just in reverse-chronological order, as some had hoped. Two features of Apple News are its story personalization and recommendation, but the selections don’t seem especially personalized and the “related stories” section often contains other publishers’ version of the same story that the user clicked on, giving it a stale feeling. All this adds up to a feeling that Apple wasn’t ready for the app release.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: “Apple wasn’t ready for the app release.”
Shocker.
So far, Apple under Tim Cook badly botched the iPad 2 launch, completely botched the iMac release in 2012 (missing Christmas, no less), botched the Maps release beyond belief, then botched the Apple Watch release all to hell by launching with no supply (à la the iMac, so much for learning lessons), launched Apple Music with a horrendous UI and rampant usability issues, launched a wildly incomplete Apple TV without even providing simple basics like Apple Remote app compatibility, and just botched the release of the iPad Pro without having its Apple Pencil or its uninspired, poorly-reviewed so-called “Smart” Keyboard available for over a month.
Attention to detail, Tim. It means something. You should give it a try sometime.
SEE ALSO:
Apple’s joyless iPad Pro launch: WTF are the Apple Pencils and Smart Keyboards? (4-5 weeks away) – November 12, 2015
Apple TV 4 is a beta product and, if you bought one, you’re an unpaid beta tester – November 5, 2015
Apple Watch has arrived for just 22 percent of preorder customers – April 28, 2015
Tim Cook’s mea culpa: iMac launch should have been postponed – April 24, 2013
Tim Cook open letter: We fell short with new Maps app; we are extremely sorry – September 28, 2012
With obtuse iPad 2 launch, Apple fails to delight 49,000 customers per day – March 21, 2011
The Drudge Report wipes the floor with Apple News, Flipboard and everything else. Matt Drudge has been the greatest news editor in the world for nearly two decades. It may surprised you that most of his stories are from liberal-left sources. Nonetheless the site presents news masterfully in a compelling and uncluttered fashion. If Apple had any interest in actually making money from Apple News, they’d hire Matt Drudge as Rush Limbaugh has suggested.
Apple is for technophobes who fancy themselves geeks.
Overhyped and overpriced, it’s overcrap.
Tim Cook was supposed to be the genius master of supply chain?
As to the News app – yesterday trying to find stories about the France Muslim terrorist attacks on the app was nearly impossible. I gave up. Stories For Me – didn’t have a one. Very disappointed in the Apple News app.
Apple needs to pull their stuff together on everything. The slippery slope nowadays is greased and quick.
Cook pays more attention to Wall Street than Apple detail. Not sure Jobs picked the right guy? And Cook has pretty much on Jobs work and now it’s Cook to lead new stuff and it’s not looking good.
It’s frustrating I cannot search for specific word or phrase on the app – like my last name – or “xbox black friday”. The Google news app is so much better in this regard that I don’t ever open the Apple news app.
Another app that I wish I could delete off my phone. Useless crap bloatware that Apple forces upon us. If I wanted facebook, vimeo, a health tracker, or whatever make it available on iTunes and quit sucking up valuable space on my phone.
I for one tried to delete it as I refuse to even click on Liberal sites like CNN CNBC etc. I tried to set it up making sure not to check these specific sites but they keep appearing. I’m done with the liberal Jam job Apple is doing. I refuse to use the app.