Apollo News reader shuts down and restarts with some RSS content missing

If you were enjoying using the Apollo News reader on your iPhone or iPad, you probably noticed that it stopped getting content for the last couple of days. In fact, the developers turned it off because they are in the middle of a conflict with some content providers.

These disputes are nothing new. The excellent newsreader Pulse had a tiff with the New York Times, but it was finally settled. The Apollo app was created by some former Bing and Google engineers, and it worked well and had an excellent presentation of content from various news sites.

I talked to company founder Evan Reas, who told TUAW the app has been shut down and pulled from the App Store while the disputes are being worked out. This morning, the data feeds reappeared with the feeds in contention stripped out, but I couldn't tell what had changed and Reas didn't want to elaborate. I hope the app comes back to the App Store soon -- if you already have the app, the feeds work, but until then there's no way to find or download it to your iPhone or iPad. We'll keep an eye on what the outcome of the dispute turns out to be.