How to Make a News App?

Are you wondering how to make a news app? 

The news and magazines app market segment is expected to reach a global market value of 1.77 billion US dollars in 2026, with a CAGR of 8.88%, as reported by Statista. According to the Ipsos MORI US Mobile app research report, a user spends 31 minutes daily on a news app.

The statistics indicate a growing interest in news applications compared to traditional mediums of television, newspapers, etc., due to easy accessibility to smartphones and internet connectivity for the masses.

The news app market statistics highlight profitable opportunities for interested business investors and startup founders.

Make a News App

A news or magazine app delivers the latest updates and information content on various topics, including politics, sports, culture, entertainment, etc. A news app is either a news aggregator app that collects and displays news from various sources, like Feedly, or a brand-specific app that augments a news agency, like the New York Times app.

If you plan to build a custom news app, you would go through the following steps:

Perform Market Research and Decide on App Specifications

You should conduct elaborate news app market research and analyze the competitors’ business models, app features, limitations, etc. You should also study the end-user demographics and interests.

The current market trends and consumer requirements would help you finalize your news app project scope and decide on the app features. Every popular news app has the following key features:

• Sign-in: Your news app should have an easy sign-in process with minimum personal details requirements, such as via social media channels like Facebook, Google account, etc. According to research, Google accounted for more than 73% of social logins across AuthO and Okta sign-in platforms. 
• News Categories: You would organize news under various categories like regional, international, political news, business news, weather updates, sports news, etc.
• Push Notifications: This feature helps keep users active on your news app. Users easily click personalized notifications and breaking news alerts to read news on subjects of their interest. High-value notifications can increase app retention rate by 3 to 10%.
• News Search: You would provide a news filter and search option so that app users can easily find the news of their interest.
• Content Formats: You need to offer news content in various formats, such as videos, articles, audio, etc. Infographics, high-quality images, etc., enhance the quality of your application and increase user engagement.
• User Interaction Tools: Features such as user comments, likes, bookmarks, etc., help users give feedback and save news content to view later.
• Social Media Integrations: You can offer interactions with other social media channels so that users can easily share news content from your app with their social media contacts on other platforms. 71% of US users use the Twitter platform to read the news.

The news app features are not just limited to these. You should offer features that make your app stand out from the rest. You would finalize the news app specifications and enlist them in a system requirements specification document. 

Your development team would consult this SRS document to build a news app as you require. You can read our article for tips on writing good project specifications.

Form a News App Development Team

You would require a competent project development team to make a news app. You should hire for the following roles:

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• A project manager manages the complete app development lifecycle, assigns tasks to other team members, tracks the progress, ensures timely delivery of app features, etc.
• A business analyst analyzes business product limitations and offers solutions according to the target market trends and expectations.
• A UI/UX designer designs an interactive app user interface.
• A native app developer develops a mobile app for a particular operating system, such as Android, iOS, etc.
• A hybrid app developer makes a cross-platform mobile app.
• An app tester tests mobile apps for their functionality and performance.

Select a News App Development Methodology

You would decide on a software development methodology for your development team to follow. Software development teams commonly use agile methods, such as Scrum, Kanban, etc., to develop mobile applications.

For example, scrum, an agile development framework, divides an entire software development project into multiple iterations. A scrum team delivers a deployable app feature at the end of each iteration, called sprint. Sprints shorten the time to market and efficiently tend to the frequently changing app market requirements. 

According to Scrum Alliance’s annual survey, 87% of survey respondents agree that scrum improves the quality of their teams’ work. Moreover, 62% believed scrum makes their project delivery successful.

You can also take advantage of agile benefits and build a small cross-functional scrum team with your developers, testers, and a scrum master (project manager). Your scrum team would conduct daily and weekly scrum meetings to discuss roadblocks, propose solutions, track performance, etc.

For more details, you can read our article on how to build a scrum team.

Provide App Development Infrastructure

You would also provide software app development infrastructure to your development team, including development IDEs, testing tools, networking services, APIs, memory management, database solutions, etc.

Cloud computing technologies help businesses access the latest app development technologies. They can utilize development resources with fast scalability and no installation or maintenance costs, etc.

We would advise you to opt for a mobile backend-as-a-service to save you time with installation, configuration, and maintenance. A cloud service provider hosts and maintains your app development infrastructure, and your team can focus entirely on app development.

Amazon Web Services dominate the cloud computing market with 175 fully active cloud services and a 45% share in the global IaaS market. You can opt for the Amazon MBaaS platform, AWS Amplify, and take advantage of the following:

• Your developers can make use of the powerful toolkit to readily develop and host full-stack and production-ready mobile and web applications on the cloud.
• You can leverage other Amazon services with flexibility, such as storage, authentication, monitoring, etc.
• As Amplify is CLI-based, it offers faster development cycles to developers who can quickly experiment with new changes and deploy them to the cloud.

Design a News App

Your UI/UX designers would create your news app interface and layout. A news app has a minimalist interface that allows users to read news reports, watch video updates, etc.

Your app designers should use UI principles of balance, contrast, pattern, etc., and UX factors like usability, usefulness, accessibility, etc., to design an intuitive and interactive app layout. A good UI/UX app design can increase the conversion rate by 200 to 400 percent.

You can follow Material Design Guidelines and Human Interface Guidelines to design Android and iOS mobile apps. 

Design tools like Proto.io would help your UI/UX designers create app wireframes and design mockups. For example, Proto.io offers the following features to UI/UX designers:

• Your designers can build, test, and share interactive and highly functional news app prototypes for any screen size like mobile, desktop, tablet, etc.
• The drag-and-drop user interface makes it easy to use for designers. It also comes with a range of readymade templates, UI components such as icons, and integrations with other design tools like Sketch. 
• It offers a web-based design editor to help your design team collaborate on the same design prototype.

Develop an MVP

Your app developers would code the news app according to the prototypes designed by UI/UX designers. We would advise you to start with a minimum viable product for your news application.

A minimum viable product or an MVP is a software product with just the core app functionality. An MVP helps business owners analyze the software potential in the user market. 42% of startups fail due to insufficient understanding of market demands. An MVP helps you here.

Your developers would create a news app MVP with essential features and deploy it for early customers. You should collect customer feedback for your developers to incorporate into successive development cycles. This way, your news app would improve according to the target customers’ expectations. 

There are two types of mobile applications: native apps and hybrid apps. Both app types require a specific skill set.

Native App Development

Native mobile apps are specific to a mobile operating system. They use device software and hardware components, like camera, memory, GPS, etc., and give an optimized performance. 

Android and iOS are major operating systems in the mobile user market. You can develop apps for both to reach the maximum number of mobile users.

iOS App Development

You would require iOS developers with expertise in Objective-C or Swift programming languages. Swift has easy syntax with a low learning curve. It is also compatible with Objective-C.

Apple recommends Swift and offers a range of supporting tools for iOS app development. For example, your developers can use Xcode IDE by Apple to code, debug, and compile an iOS app. They can use SwiftUI to code an intuitive application frontend, Jazzy for style documentation, etc.

Moreover, your news app developers would use APIs like Apple News to publish and manage news articles, User Notifications to send important app alerts, Apple Pay as a gateway for in-app purchases, etc.

Android App Development

Android app developers mostly use Java programming language. It is platform-independent, and a majority of Android SDKs use Java. Kotlin has also gained popularity in Android app development since its release and support by Google.

You can read the comparison of Java and Kotlin in our article.

Your developers can use tools like Android Studio IDE, Android Virtual Device Manager, Android Asset Studio, etc., to build an engaging news app for Android efficiently using the built-in compiler, debugger, plugins, etc.

Moreover, your developers would use APIs like Newsdata(io), News API, etc., to integrate news feeds into Android applications. Other APIs and libraries like Notifications, Social, Authorization, etc., by Android, would help your developers add these features to your news app efficiently.

Hybrid App Development

Hybrid apps, also called cross-platform apps, are not platform-specific and run on every mobile device. Developers write app code once and deploy it for every platform. App code is wrapped in a native container to give a specific OS experience. However, the hybrid app experience is less in performance and interactivity than native apps.

Your app developers can use standard web technologies, like HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript, to write a hybrid app code base. Frameworks like Next.js provide support to develop hybrid apps quickly. 

Your developers can quickly build SEO-friendly news applications via Next.js out-of-box tooling and configuration. Features like image optimization, debugging, fast updates, free hosting, etc., make it a favorable choice for app developers. 

Moreover, your hybrid app developers can use APIs like Web Search, Newsriver, News API, etc., to integrate news feeds, OneSignal, Experience API, etc., for push notifications, and APIs like Facebook API, Twitter API, etc., for social media integrations.

Database Development

Your news app requires a database system for easy data storage and retrieval. Your developers would design a database model that explains various business entities and processes for a news application. 

Different data modeling techniques that your developers should know about include relational, entity-relationship, object-oriented, etc. Developers use a database management system to implement this data model. 

As your news content could be in various formats, including videos, text, images, etc., your developers would need document-based database technology, such as Couchbase, to handle unstructured data.

Your developers can use Couchbase to build flexible and scalable data models via features like full-text search, built-in cache management, real-time data replication, etc. Couchbase Mobile enables you to store and access synced cloud data on any device irrespective of internet connection which would make your news app always available and fast.

Big Data and Machine Learning

You would require expert developers familiar with the latest technologies of artificial intelligence to build advanced capabilities in your news applications. 

Businesses can utilize the enormous business data available for enhanced business intelligence, leading to better customer understanding, improved business strategies, and increased business growth. 80% of businesses have reported an increase in revenue after AI adoption.

Your developers should be able to process and handle the big data and utilize it via machine learning models. Some ML-based features in a news app include a display of personalized news content, classification of news articles, news reports summarization, fake news detection, etc.

Multiple programming libraries and software tools are available to help businesses run machine learning models quickly without implementing ML algorithms from scratch. 

However, your developers should be familiar with ML concepts and algorithms like supervised learning, unsupervised learning, regression analysis, clustering, classification, etc., to adopt a suitable machine-learning model for your business data.

For example, your ML developers can use Apache SystemDS, an open-source platform for end-to-end data science lifecycle. They can perform data cleaning, feature extraction, train machine learning models, etc., using SystemDS.

Test your News Application

Your app testers should test your news application and ensure it runs correctly without any errors or bugs. Test engineers run multiple tests to guarantee mobile application usability, functionality, performance, security, etc.

App testers automate test scripts to test functional and non-functional requirements and efficiently complete the application’s quality assurance process.

Some automated testing tools that can help your QA team include XCTest for IOS apps, Espresso for Android apps, Appium for native and hybrid apps, etc.

Publish your News App

Once your news app passes all the quality assurance checks by app testers, your developers can start app deployment. They should publish an iOS news app on Apple App Store according to Apple publishing guidelines and an Android news app on Google Play Store per their guidelines.

Developers use DevOps practices to introduce agility in the development process. They quickly develop high-quality software with continuous testing and integration.

Some software tools to help build a DevOps pipeline are Apache Maven for dev process automation, Bamboo for continuous integration, GitHub for version control, Kubernetes for configuration management, etc.

Read our articles on how to build a DevOps pipeline and the top DevOps tools available in the market for more information.

Monitor and Maintain

You would continue to monitor your news app performance in the app store after publishing. Your business development team should implement ASO (app store optimization) to help your news app rank better on the app store.

You should also gauge user feedback via app store reviews and in-app surveys. Tools like SurveySparrow can help you implement in-app survey forms in your news app.

Your app development team should plan the successive development iterations according to user feedback.

You also need to maintain your app to keep it active among users. There are continuous software updates and advancements in hardware technologies. Your developers should keep your news app up to date with the latest software versions and hardware updates to give excellent performance.

Your development team would also need to provide technical support in case of any bugs or glitches in the app’s performance.

Ready to Make a News App?

The mobile app market is quite competitive. Your app would take more than basic features to compete with the popular news apps in the market. You would need competent developers to make a news app with advanced features.

If you, as a business CEO or CTO, do not find experienced app developers and testers on your project team, we would advise you to partner with an experienced software development company.

Why not outsource your complete news app development project or hire required developers from the expert developers’ community at DevTeam.Space? All our developers are experts in the latest software development technologies and have software development experience for multiple industries.

You can write to us your initial app development project specifications, and one of our account managers would get back to you to discuss how we can help you make a news app successfully.

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