How to Add RSS Feeds & Sites to Apple News in iOS

The News app is bundled in modern versions of iOS, accessible from the home screen as a standard app icon and from the Siri Suggestions screen in Spotlight under the News section on an iPhone or iPad. While News app includes a handful of curated Apple-approved sites, users can customize the app on their own by adding websites they like, and also use the News app as an RSS reader. This allows you to add just about any site or feed to News app yourself, including great sites like this one.

How to Manually Subscribe to RSS Feeds & Websites to News App in iOS

Want to add an RSS feed of a site to News app? Can’t find a site you like in the Apple approved list on News app? No problem, here’s how you can add them yourself from Safari in iOS and subscribe directly:

1. Open Safari on iOS and visit the website you want to add a subscription to for Apple News (note you may need to navigate directly to the RSS feed of the website in question, for example here’s our RSS feed to add, and this applies to many other sites as well*)
2. Tap on the Sharing icon in Safari while the RSS feed or webpage is open



3. Scroll over in the options screen and choose “Add to News”



4. News app will launch itself automatically and jump to the “Favorites” section, where the site you added will be included

Now you can launch News app and under the “Favorites” section will be the RSS feeds and websites you added yourself, making News app into an RSS reader of sorts that is built directly into iOS. This is nice in that it allows you to add whatever websites and feeds you want, even if they aren’t pre-bundled in the official list within Apple approved sites.

* Apple News app basically aggregates from RSS, but the News app is not particularly good at detecting RSS feeds on many websites, and so you’ll often have to navigate directly to the RSS feed in question and add the actual RSS feed URL to news directly. You can sometimes get around that by requesting the desktop version of a site from Safari in iOS before attempting to add it to News, but going directly to the RSS feed may be more reliable. Perhaps this will be fixed in a future version of iOS and News app.

News app is included on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch in iOS 9 and later releases, if you don’t see the feature it’s perhaps because you have not updated the version, or because the News app is having a hard time detecting the RSS feed for the site, as just mentioned, if that’s the case simply load the RSS feed directly before adding it. Of course, some users may recall that iOS Safari has a Shared Links feature that can also subscribe to RSS by way of Twitter accounts, so if you have no use for News app you can still subscribe to your favorite websites by way of Twitter as well.

For Mac users, there isn’t a dedicated built-in News app, but you can instead add and subscribe to RSS feeds directly into Safari within OS X, add them to pinned tab sites, or just visit webpages directly in the Safari browser.