So Apple killed Newsstand yesterday. Well, sort of — it doesn't actually die until iOS 9 ships in the fall, but they announced its replacement at the keynote and that's close enough for me to start writing the eulogy now.
I'm not going to do a full WWDC recap here. Every tech blog on earth is going to have three thousand words on Apple Music by tomorrow morning ($9.99 a month, $14.99 for a family plan, free three month trial, Beats 1 radio hosted by Zane Lowe, launching June 30th if you care, which apparently everyone does). I don't have much to add to that pile. What actually caught my attention was the smaller announcement sitting right next to it: Apple News, the app that's replacing Newsstand in iOS 9.
Newsstand was always a weird little app. Remember when it showed up in 2011 as this fake wooden bookshelf icon sitting on your home screen, and you couldn't even delete it or put it in a folder with normal apps for like two years? I bet the number of people who opened it more than once a week was basically zero, outside maybe some magazine diehards. It existed mostly so publishers had somewhere to put their bloated, slow-loading digital editions that nobody asked for. Good riddance, honestly.
But Apple News isn't really a Newsstand replacement, it's a Flipboard replacement, and that's the part I keep chewing on. It's an aggregator with a formatting API publishers submit content through, all inside Apple's walled garden. Which, fine, that's the direction everything's been going for a while now. I just can't help noticing this is one more small step away from RSS, and Apple's been quietly doing that for years. They pulled RSS support out of Safari back in Safari 6 and nobody blinked. Google killed Reader two years ago and everyone moved on to Feedly (I did too, I've still got something like 140 feeds in there, half of which I never actually read, the other half being the only reason I still know some of my favorite small blogs updated at all).
I get why this happens. Most people never used RSS and never will. My mom doesn't know what a feed URL is and she's not going to start caring in 2015. But I run a blog that's been sitting on the same platform since November 2011, and it still has an RSS icon in the sidebar that maybe nine people actively use, and every time one of these announcements comes out I get a little twinge about it. Not panic, just — a twinge. The open web keeps losing these small unglamorous battles to closed, curated, algorithm-fed apps, one app icon at a time, and nobody really notices because each individual loss is small.
Anyway. Small tangent, they also said Swift is going open source later this year, which is honestly the announcement I'm most excited about out of the whole keynote, more than News or even Music if I'm being honest. I spent way too many weekends this spring fighting with Xcode crashing on a half-finished side project written in Swift 1.2, and the idea that the language might eventually run somewhere other than inside Apple's own IDE, on Apple's own OS, is kind of a big deal for anyone who wants to poke at it without paying the Mac tax first. Swift 2 also picked up proper error handling with do/try/catch, which sounds boring unless you've written the alternative, which was passing NSError pointers around like it's 2009.
I don't have a tidy conclusion here. iOS 9 doesn't land until the fall, so my Feedly folder isn't going anywhere for a few months yet. I'll probably still be using it in October, still ignoring whatever News.app has to offer, still getting a little twinge every time Apple ships one more thing that makes RSS a tiny bit more optional than it already was. Somebody's got to keep the lights on for the format nobody's actively killing but nobody's really saving either.