My coworker and I have spent the last few months building an iPad app on top of the Google News API, which has just yesterday been slated to shutdown: http://code.google.com/apis/newssearch/<p>We were motivated to create the app based on a lack of quality "hard news" sources (for lack of a better term) on the iPad. There is no shortage of "social" news apps such as Flipboard and Pulse, and there exist a slew of quality RSS readers (Reeder is indispensable to me). But I also crave conventional, un-sexy, non-web2.0 journalism; a simple reporting of the news of the day.<p>I used to spend obscene chunks of my day parked on CNN.com, click the refresh button incessantly... before the quality of their reporting diminished. And while there are iPad apps for individual news outlets (the NY Times, CNN, etc all have their own apps), the great thing about Google News is the fact that they aggregate content from news outlets around the word, from the Times to Al Jazeera to my tiny local newspaper.<p>Google News doesn't have a spectacular web interface, especially when accessed on the iPad. We thought we could do better... and purely for our own use (at first), we built an app on top of their API. At this point it's 80% completed; here are some screenshots:<p>https://s3.amazonaws.com/jackadam_broadsheet/broadsheet.jpg<p>Now that the API is being shut down, we have an app with no data source. What do we do? On top of spending all that development time seemingly for naught, we love using our app, and don't want to go back to the old way!<p>So we're making an appeal to the HN community, in search of creative ideas on how to proceed.<p>We haven't been able to find any great news API alternatives. Yahoo News recently shut down their news API, and the Bing news search is missing a couple critical features. But maybe there are others?<p>[Also: I'd like to keep the conversation pragmatic and avoid the (perfectly valid) question of whether it's wise to build an app entirely reliant on some third party's good graces.]
<i>We haven't been able to find any great news API alternatives.</i><p><i>avoid the (perfectly valid) question of whether it's wise to build an app entirely reliant on some third party's good graces.</i><p>In my opinion, it isn't wise to build an app entirely reliant on a 3rd party API. Looking for a new API to migrate to says you haven't learned from the mistake you made. I've made the same mistake with an attempt at a SMS to Social Message tunnel on facebook/myspace back in the day. Then facebook made it a native feature. It was an important lesson to learn.<p>If I were you guys, I'd stop looking for APIs and start building your own backend. This way, you can pull in more than one source of data. Also remember that there are other ways of getting data.