Introduction

Today, there is a flurry of information available online. The problem is, with so much fake news spreading around like wildfire, it becomes difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, and fact from fiction. In the UK, 45.43% of adults confess that they encounter fake news daily. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic Ocean, 8 in 10 US citizens believe they have consumed fake news at least one point in their lives.

The statistics paint an alarming picture. With so much misleading information swirling around the internet, it becomes vital that consumers turn to a fact-based and proven digital news content provider for the content they can trust to be accurate, truthful, and always accessible. This need laid the cornerstone for the Graphic NewsPlus magazine app development, which offers free and premium news content to users. 

Features 

The Graphic NewsPlus magazine app for Android and iOS brings the following to the table in terms of features for users: 

• Free and paid content. To ensure great accessibility to digital magazines and news content for all, the app offers free and paid content options for app users. This allows readers to get a feel of the content before moving to a subscription
• Social media login. Setting up new accounts can be stressful and tedious for new app users. To get around this problem, the app provides social media login via pre-existing Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Gmail accounts. 
• The app provides a page list of up-to-date magazines, rounded up from a plethora of various vendors. Magazines are accessible on a subscription model, ranging from daily to annually and a lot more in between
• Security payment covers a host of options. Users can pay for their subscriptions online via PayPal and through other popular alternatives including GHLink, Master Card, VISA, and mobile money
• Quick, friendly and adaptable navigation to give users the best view experiences both vertically and horizontally
• Users can buy subscription plans for friends and family as a gift

Challenge

To build a news app like this, we identify a couple of challenges that we wanted to solve as follows: 

• Categorizing content from different vendors: The app fetches content from different vendors. We needed to have an algorithm that separates free and premium content while limiting access to free content to registered users only 
• Cross-browser compatibility: Responsive design was the biggest attribute of the app. We needed to ensure seamless cross-browser as well as cross-device interoperability, hence we leveraged Flutter technology to ensure this. 
• Location-based pricing: The app serves users across different regions, hence there was the need to ensure subscription pricing details were relevant to the currency of the location. We implemented this via a real-time currency database which was tethered to location parameters obtained from users’ IP addresses. 

Proposed Solution 

Over the years, we’ve crafted, finetuned, and perfected our app development process to realize a formula that works. We approach development in a pair of phases, that carries us through to success with a hands-approach strategy that prevails right from front to back-end design. 

User Types:

• Customers (mobile app)
• Vendors (web panel)
• Admin

Platform:

• Mobile application (Android & iOS)
• Admin panel (Web panel)

Here’s how we approached this news app development project: 

Phase 1: 

Our first phase of the design process heavily incorporated gathering information, and better understanding the proposal for the mobile application. We take our time in this phase because it is at this point that we gather the building blocks of the app going forward. Missing a single element can send us back to the drawing and negate days’ worth of progress. We approached the first phase in the following steps

• Ideation and Concept development- we coordinated with the client to best ensure a seamless alignment of technical specifications and app design preferences
• Wireframe design: We then designed wireframes, which added clarity about the exact website features and how they’d look across devices for the cross-platform news app
• ER diagram presentation to show the relationship between backend features and front-end features

Phase 2:

This is where the rubber hits the road, and where we went from idea to implementation for the Graphic NewsPlus app. After getting the go-ahead from the client, the steps involved were as follows: 

• Back-end development- we implemented robust control features to enable the admin to perform bulk subscriber registrations
• We used PHP Laravel as it offers the most secure and one of the best frameworks for the language
• UAT to ensure end-user satisfaction
• Database design. Here, we leveraged My SQL to ensure peak performance of the app even when there are many queries

At every step, we carried out testing to eliminate bugs and ensure a flawless application from the end user’s viewpoint. 

Results  

Our client was pleased with the job and our news app development company was able to meet all of Graphic NewsPlus’s expectations. The user registration process was quick and easy, while the navigation and responsiveness across browsers and platforms exceeded the client’s requirements. User feedback has been positive, with consumers referring the app to family and friends while subscription numbers have been rising steadily since app deployment to the respective device stores. To date, this GCGL mobile app development case study remains one of our most successful projects in recent times.