Difficulties Previewing Apple News
Previewing Stories in Apple News Did Not Work For Us
Why is it so incredibly difficult to preview a story on Apple News? Pre-written content uploads to Apple News via an RSS Feed just fine. The articles populate ready to preview, but you cannot just simply click on the article to preview how Apple News will display the story.
Instead of being able to preview the stories on a desktop browser, users have to go through a convoluted process that had us throwing our hands up in the air due to wasting valuable time. The worst part is, even after all the time spent, we were ultimately unable to preview our stories. Whereas with Medium, you simply copy & paste your story into the editor or insert the link to the story for Medium to pull your content right into the editor.
Medium makes previewing stories easy. Apple News makes it incredibly difficult. Straight up almost caused us an aneurysm.
The U/X Idea
Adopt a method like Medium's of previewing stories added to Apple News.
The User Experience Problem
Previewing how your stories appear in Apple News before submitting to Apple for review is incredibly difficult. At first, the process seems like it will work smoothly. Users can submit their stories via an RSS Feed and almost immediately the stories begin to populate in Apple News for preview.
It’s all downhill from there. In order to preview the story, users must view the story on an iOS9 device or later. Apple News provides a preview link. We emailed the link to ourselves and opened it in Safari on an iPhone 8 running iOS11. We were immediately prompted to open it in Apple News. Apple News then opens to show our Wexford news page with no articles for preview.
Apple News instructs users to search for their company in Apple News as an alternative to using the preview link. Since the preview link didn’t work, we attempted to find our company page in Apple News. After searching (and searching and searching) we could not find our company page to preview stories.
Tried the preview link again - no luck. Same issue. Company page opened with no stories to preview. We went back into Apple News in Safari on a Macbook and could see the stories listed there waiting to be previewed - but you can’t preview them on a desktop! Unless you download the News Preview app.
So we downloaded the News Preview app. No big deal, but we also had to download the 5 GB Xcode app too. With both apps installed, we opened the News Preview app and connected our ID number, but our information did not appear. Quit the app and restarted it. Then the app opened for half a second and quit immediately. Opened it again, News Preview again quit immediately. Restarted the computer. Opened News Preview again - surprise - it quit again immediately!
Then we opened up Xcode and it started to install and initiate. Then we opened up News Preview again and entered our ID again. Again our information did not appear. Restarted the computer again, opened News Preview, and our information still did not appear.
Ultimately we submitted the stories for Apple News to review without previewing how they would look because we could not preview the stories.
The U/X Solution
Allow users to preview stories similar to how Medium allows users to preview stories. It would be ideal if Apple News could keep the RSS Feed function. The stories ported over just fine, it’s just previewing them on a mobile device or via the app were near impossible. For us, it actually was impossible. Maybe there is a step we missed, but we read different support threads, tried different methods, and attempted multiple times. Regardless, it should not be this difficult to preview a story.
Apple News should allow users to preview the story on a desktop web browser. The stories obviously ported over just fine via RSS. Why then make users preview in Apple News? And if you could actually preview in Apple News and something needed to be changed, such as titles or images not being brought over correctly, can you make changes in the Apple News app? And if you can make changes, do you expect users to do this on their mobile device?
Conclusion
Previewing stories in Apple News was difficult and convoluted. And for us, we were unable to preview our stories even though they ported over fine via RSS.
Allow users to preview and edit their stories in the browser. Do not make people use the Apple News iPhone app to attempt to preview their stories. Instead, structure the ability to preview and edit stories off of Medium’s method.
Further, if you have to download the News Preview app to preview because it somehow is better than previewing in a desktop browser, write the News Preview app’s code so that it does not require a download of Xcode. And if it does somehow require a download of Xcode, have the News Preview app deliver an error that Xcode must first be opened instead of just quitting immediately.
Hoping our stories appear okay on Apple News and this issue gets fixed.
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