Mobile apps have changed how people consume daily news, whether it is textual or audio-visual. Most people expect news apps to be user-friendly, dynamic, and reliable.
To create a great mobile news app, don't miss out on some important features. If you look at the most successful news applications, all of them offer a variety of features. Before starting your own application, let's talk about the most common elements that an excellent news app should have.
Must-Have Features for a Great News App
To create a strong competitive advantage, you have to think about some innovative features that distinguish your application from your competitors’. Here are the crucial features that the best news app developers include in their apps:
- Categories
- Search and Filters
- Push Notifications
- Engagement Tools
- Social Media Integration
- Registration and Personal Profiles
- Personal Feed
- Options to Interact With Content
Categories
As a rule, in news applications, the news is updated almost every minute. In all this endless news flow, the user should always be able to view exactly information that interests him at the moment. That is why it is highly necessary to think through the functions of sorting news using categories and tags.
It is equally important to test these sorting algorithms in the finished product and make sure that everything works as expected, and you don't have news or articles that appear in the wrong categories.
Search and Filters
Having made the application more convenient by implementing categories and tags, do not stop there. Almost every good news application or website has search and filtering functions to provide its users with the opportunity to search for information of their interest according to specific criteria and parameters.
Push Notifications
Push Notifications are meant to attract users' attention by using alerts, even if it’s just for a second. Your reason for breaking someone’s focus must be justifiable. Although push notifications tend to complement almost every modern app, it's practically crucial in the news app. After all, your users would not want to miss the latest news.
Engagement Tools
News resources such as applications and sites simply require implementing a commenting system, where readers can discuss the news. However, do not forget that many users can be rude or cruel, so of course, it is worth thinking of algorithms that will allow you to block offensive comments, as well as spam.
The most common solutions to this problem are to allow users to log in via social networks to be able to leave a comment or use ready-made solutions from third parties.
Social Media Integration
As we touched on the topic of the social network in the previous paragraph, now let's go deeper into this subject. The integration of social networks in a news application, of course, cannot be limited solely to the ability to leave comments.
As with many other types of business for news resources, social networks are among the essential marketing channels. So when users share their favorite news or articles on social networks, it helps increase engagement naturally on your app. It also provides you free traffic sources and organic advertising.
Registration and Personal Profiles
In addition to integrating social networks and third-party solutions, you can add the option for your users to register in the application. As the user’s time is precious, you cannot expect them to fill out lengthy registration forms. Therefore, it would be better to limit yourself to the inevitable fields. Also, allow users to register with their social network accounts, their Google account, and AppleID.
The feature to register not only solves the problem of undesirable and anonymous comments but also allows you to understand your audience better and set the stage for our next amazing item, a personalized feed.
Personalized Feed
Due to the abundance of news in the modern world, the use of categories and filters certainly facilitates the use of a news resource. But, there are more useful solutions available now; the personal feed is one of these.
With a personal feed feature, every time the user logs into the application, he doesn’t have to set up his own news feed or search separately for any news of his interest. Machine learning technology helps you develop personalized user experiences. Don’t forget to use machine learning in the app to analyze the preferences of individual users and create news feeds customized to the interests of each user.
Such a solution is very convenient and eases access to relevant news for the user. You can find this feature in most of the popular applications, such as Twitter and Instagram.
Options to Interact With Content
Last but not least, you must give the user different options for interacting with articles.
Apart from features such as likes and comments, we must step ahead and offer the user something that increases engagement. So, allow the users an opportunity to save their favorite articles, which they can open anytime from their profile. A similar feature is implemented on Instagram, where you can save your favorite post.
Medium has another great feature that you can incorporate. You probably noticed that Medium allows you to select any area of the text and share only that part. This is very clever because it will enable the users to avoid reposting the entire incomprehensible and ridiculously long link and share only the part of the text that interests them the most. Such a small change can take your social shares to a whole new level.
Conclusion
When developing a news app, it is important to include all the crucial features that make it engaging and easy to use. So, here are the top features of a great news app.
However, it is also necessary to research your competitors to identify other useful features that can be included in your future or existing apps.
Besides, we recommend you find a competent application development company that will help you become an “appreneur".
