Feb 1, 2023

How to create a news app

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A couple of decades ago, people learned the news from newspapers, then with the advent of television — from the news release. With the development of technology, news has become available 24/7. Today, to keep abreast of events that occur in the world, country or city, a mobile phone with a news application is enough. What you need to create a news app and what nuances you should pay attention to — find out in this article.

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Is there any demand

In today’s world, news spread at the speed of light, and every second there is some fresh content that people want to know about. The popularity of news apps over the past year has grown tremendously.

News makes up a significant part of web traffic, especially through services such as Google News. With the advent of smartphones, the audience of news portals has switched to mobile applications. The largest companies in the world, such as the BBC, New York Times, CNN and others, presented their mobile apps.

Along with them, smart content aggregators like Flipboard and Google News are appeared, which quickly became the most popular news aggregators with millions of downloads. These examples show that there is a place for growth, demand, and opportunity in this niche. Creating a news app can be a successful idea.

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Types of News Applications

News aggregator

These are websites and apps that collect news from around the web, structure them and offer them to readers. They can be local to the city, tell the news of the country or broadcast world events. With a competent approach and the right choice of monetization method, such an application can bring financial benefits to the owner and gather a large audience.

What content is relevant for the news app:

  • Events of the city and region. For example, product exhibitions, regional fairs, city children’s parties, charity events.
  • General political events.
  • Global events that are interesting to a wide range of users.
  • Announcements of concerts, exhibitions, musical evenings, the repertoire of theaters, etc.
  • Weather in a city, region, country, and world.

Online Magazines

These are newspapers or online magazines with their own editors who choose topics and write articles. Often they already have their own website, and then they should think about a mobile version of their publication.

A news application can help an online publication achieve these goals:

  • Increased user engagement.
  • Efficiency. The news comes to readers’ devices immediately after posting, so they won’t miss important events.
  • Interactivity The user decides which categories are of interest to him and which notifications he wants to receive. Diverse media content in the format of video, text, audio, and photo is positively perceived by the audience.
  • Audience growth. App development provides an opportunity to reach a wider audience of readers.
  • Advertising in the app and monetization of the service.
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Required functions

A good news app has many features. To get started, add all the basic functions that are in popular applications. And after that, you should think about the possibilities that will become a competitive advantage and force users to install your service specifically.

API

The most important element of any news application is the feed API. After all, you need to take the news from somewhere. If we are dealing with an application for our media with original content, you will have to develop your own API. For an aggregator, you can choose different news APIs and integrate them into your application. Bloomberg News or Dow Jones is great for financial news. If you want to talk about sports, then the ESPN API will be a great option.

Categories

For convenience, the news should be divided into categories and be tagged. To do this, create a special sorting algorithm.

Highlight quotes and save news

Give users the ability to highlight quotes and share them with friends. It will also be convenient to save articles of interest so that you can read them later.

Machine learning

Add machine learning to analyze and understand user preferences. When implemented correctly, this will give them personalized content tailored to their interests.

Social networks

This is a very important point. Share news with subscribers, offer them to download the application, communicate with readers. Give people the opportunity to discuss interesting news and share them on social networks.

Profile

Creating a personal page, people will be able to evaluate publications, comment on them or even chat on the forum of the news portal.

Registration

A personal user profile is one of the most important features. Be sure to give users several ways to register an account: using mail, social networks or a phone number.

Notifications

The best way to keep users interested and return them to the application is to use push notifications. Ask users for permission to send notifications and let them choose which news they want to see first.

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Decide on a development vector

In fact, everything is quite simple: if you are the owner of a news resource, you should develop an app for the magazine. If this is a new project, your option is a news aggregator. In both cases, the actions will be different.

For media, you need to decide on the format of the information and decide how to attract users. Of course, the news is not a game application, but it’s worth considering how you can hook a user. Make your resource interactive.

Now let’s move on to the idea of a news aggregator. First, you need to answer yourself the following questions:

  • What news will you publish: city, regional, international?
  • What topics are you going to divide articles: business, economic, political, cultural.
  • What platforms will your service support? To succeed, you must make your service available to all users and platforms: iOS, Android, Windows.
  • Find a proven source of news and make sure. For example, the Newsy application uses information sources such as The New York Times, The Guardian, Fox News Channel, and others.

Having formulated the main idea and task of your service, you can make a more detailed list of functions and features of the application.

Monetization

To develop your resource, you should think about monetizing the application. There are several ways to get good money thanks to the news app:

  1. Advertising. Offer companies to advertise in your application. This can be done in the form of a separate ad unit, banners or advertisements during the launch of the application.
  2. Subscription. This monetization model is mainly used for online magazines that offer unique content. For example, a New York Times subscription costs $15 per month for full access to all content, or $130 for an annual subscription.
  3. Freemium. You can offer a paid option to watch videos or read the news without ads.
  4. Affiliate materials. Write paid materials to tell about, for example, events from leading companies.
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How much does it cost to develop a news app

If you want to create only an application, for development for iOS and Android you need to assemble the following command:

  • Project Manager;
  • UI/UX designer;
  • Developer for Android and iOS;
  • Backend developer;
  • Tester.

The cost of creating a news app will depend on the set of features and the complexity of the applications. The approximate cost is about $53,000 for developing an application on two platforms.

To sum up

People will always be interested in the latest news. Therefore, such a business remains relevant at any time. To make content consumption as convenient as possible for users who spend most of their time with the phone is the key to the success of the mobile application. To find your niche in the market of news apps, determine the direction, take care of the basic functions and do not forget about uniqueness.