Apple News alternatives for iPhone (free)
You do not need Apple News, or Apple News+, to read on an iPhone. What to look for in a free alternative, and how to move your sources across.
Looking for an Apple News alternative usually means one of two things, and they are not the same search.
Sometimes you want off the free Apple News app: the preinstalled reader, the editor-picked top stories, the personalization that lives inside Apple's world. Sometimes you want off Apple News+, the $12.99-a-month layer of licensed magazines and papers. A free alternative can replace the first job completely. It cannot honestly replace the second, because the second is a stack of editions Apple has paid for.
This piece is about the first job — a free way to read on an iPhone that is not Apple News — and about moving your sources across without losing a week to it.
What you are actually leaving
Apple News, the free app, is good at a short list of things.
It is already there. No download, no account required to start reading. That is a high bar for any replacement.
Someone is editing. Top Stories is a desk, not only a ranking. That is rare in a free reader, and you will miss it if your alternative is a firehose.
It personalizes as you read. Apple says the recommendations run on the device and that it does not let advertisers track you. For a lot of people the app is simply pleasant, which is why they stay.
News+ sits on top of it. If you subscribe, the same app unlocks the licensed catalog. If you do not, you are in the free layer, and a lot of taps still end on a wall.
Keep that list honest while you shop. An alternative that is "more private" and worse at every one of those jobs will lose to Apple News in about ten days. The test is whether you still open the old app on day fourteen.
What a good Apple News alternative actually has to do
Marketing copy will offer you "the best Apple News alternative for iPhone." Ignore the superlative. Four questions decide the matter.
1. Can you read before you identify yourself?
If the first screen is an account wall, you have not found a reader. You have found a signup funnel with headlines attached. A free alternative that demands an email to show you NPR is a worse deal than the app that came on the phone. Why a news app shouldn't need your account is the longer version of this point.
2. Where does the taste profile live?
Every news app claims to learn what you like. On a server, that profile is a company asset. On the device, it is a file that dies when you delete the app. Apple News argues it does the second. An alternative that quietly does the first is not an upgrade.
3. What does the app itself receive?
No account is not the same as nothing leaving the phone. An app can skip signup and still send every article you open back to its own servers. The only architecture that makes that impossible is one where the company has no server in the path — where the phone talks to publishers directly.
4. How is it paid for?
Free is a claim about your credit card, not about the business. Contextual ads need no profile. Behavioral ads need one. A subscription is at least honest. The method for checking this takes about a minute: open the app, try to read, then read the privacy policy and the App Privacy card on the store listing.
If a candidate fails the first question, stop. The rest will not save it.
The four kinds of replacement
RSS readers
The oldest answer and still the most robust. You pick the sources, the reader fetches their public feeds, and nothing ranks them except time.
Good if you already know which outlets you trust. Hard work if you do not, and slightly thankless on an iPhone if what you liked about Apple News was that someone else did the sorting. You will get exactly what you subscribed to, including the morning when eight of your twelve feeds carry the same story.
Publisher apps
One outlet, one app. Excellent depth, zero breadth. After a month you have six of them, six notification settings, and no way to see the same event from two countries at once.
Keep the one or two you actually read in full. Do not try to rebuild Apple News out of publisher apps. That is how people end up with a folder named News that they never open.
The browser
Bookmarks, a reading list, a couple of homepages. Free, private, and completely manual. For some people this is the whole answer. For most it is the setup they had before they installed Apple News, and they installed Apple News for a reason.
Privacy-first aggregators
Apps that do the gathering but keep the profile off their servers. This is the category that can actually replace Apple News as a daily reader, and also the category where the claims need checking. "Privacy-first" is a marketing phrase before it is an architecture. The four questions above are how you tell.
The same migration logic applies if what you are leaving is Google News rather than Apple News. The Google News version of this argument is the sibling piece: clustering, personalization, breadth, and whether the exit is actually an exit.
Moving your sources across
Whatever you land on, the move is three steps. It is dull, and that is why it works.
1. Write down what you actually read.
Open Apple News and look at the channels and following list with a hard eye. Most people follow a crowd and read six outlets. Write down the six.
2. Check those six are covered.
In an RSS reader you add them by feed URL. In an aggregator, search the source list before you commit a week to it. If two of your six are missing, the alternative is not an alternative for you, however nice the privacy story.
3. Keep both for two weeks.
The honest test is not the first day. It is whether you stop opening Apple News. If after a fortnight you still reach for it every morning, the new app is not doing the job, and that is useful information rather than a failure.
Do not try to recreate Top Stories. Recreate your sources. The editorial desk is the part of Apple News you will not get back in a feed reader.
Where GetMyNews fits
We built GetMyNews as a reader you can use without joining anything.
No account. No email, no password, no social login. The step does not exist.
No GetMyNews server. The app reads publishers' public RSS feeds straight from your phone. There is no machine of ours that could record what you read, because there is no machine of ours between you and the publisher.
Personalization on the device. It learns from your swipes and reorders the deck. That model is a file in the app's own storage.
The tap lands on the publisher. Open a card and their page loads in your browser, with your session. If you subscribe to a paper, you see the piece you paid for.
1,200 feeds across 22 countries. By default you get the English-language ones — 359 feeds across 14 countries, including NPR, CNN, BBC News, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CNBC and the Los Angeles Times. Add any other country explicitly; the phone's browser translates the page in one tap.
Free, one ad every twenty stories. No subscription, no in-app purchase, nothing locked.
Curated, not crawled. Those 1,200 feeds were chosen and checked. You get newsrooms, not an index of whatever the open web published in the last hour.
When several outlets cover the same story, they group into one card. That is the closest thing to Apple News's sense of "this is the story" that a feed-based reader can honestly offer, and because the set spans 22 countries it is often more than one country's framing.
GetMyNews is in review with Apple and Google. It is not downloadable yet. When it ships it will be free, with no waiting list. Come back and get it then.
The decision that saves the rest of the afternoon
Do you want an editor, a chronology, or an algorithm that stays on the phone?
If you want an editor, Apple News is still a serious free answer. If you want chronology, set up an RSS reader. If you want an algorithm that is not attached to an identity, look at the aggregator category and run the four questions until one of them passes. The rest is a two-week test with the six sources you actually read.
Related: Google News alternatives that don't track you if the thing you are leaving is a profile rather than a preinstalled app, and best news apps without an account for the one-minute check.