Apple News

Apple News is a news aggregator app developed by Apple Inc., for its iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, and macOS operating systems. The iOS version was launched with the release of iOS 9. It is the successor to the Newsstand app included in previous versions of iOS. Users can read news articles with it, based on publishers, websites and topics they select, such as technology or politics. Overview The Apple News app works by pulling in news stories from the web through various syndication feeds (Atom and RSS) or from news publishing partners through the JSON descriptive Apple News Format. Any news publisher can submit their content for inclusion in Apple News. Stories added through Safari will be displayed via the in-app web browser included with the app. News is fetched from publisher's websites through the AppleBot web crawler bot. The bot fetches feeds, as well as web pages and images for the Apple News service. It has received criticism for being poorly behaved and not being fault tolerant; resulting in high loads on websites. The Apple News version distributed with iOS 9 made it hard to differentiate traffic originating from within the app from traffic originating from other apps. Apple News version 2, introduced in iOS 10, began identifying itself using its own User-Agent string, making it possible to measure the reach of Apple News using web analytics solutions. Traffic analytics was previously only available to paying publisher partners through iAds.