Lessons learned in five years of working with mobile news apps. Rule number 1: Do not engage in news applications

I spent five years working on a mobile news application — first as an editor to help find and prepare content, and then as a product manager who leads the application through a complex visual and technical redesign.

And here is the most important lesson I learned from my experience: if you are a small or medium publisher, then do not grasp the news application. If you already have it - discard it. Better use resources to create your mobile site. Respect edition Atavist for making such a correct and radical decision.

Pattern: when large publishers create niche applications (for example, NYT Opinion), they lose all their scale and are equated to small publishers for a particular category.
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If you are one of the publishers that is in the Top 10 in its category (print, online or TV), then create a flagship application. Think of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Buzzfeed (not Buzzfeed News), Univision, CNN or ABC News. This is another channel for attracting readers, but do not forget about the pattern written above.

Native application is difficult to build and maintain

Do you want to add a function, change some parts of the user interface, change colors or correct errors? You can write code as quickly as you want. But then you have to wait. As a rule, Apple takes two weeks to approve any changes in the code. And at this time, your readers do not see the change: in these two weeks, they usually fall asleep you bad reviews on the App Store and put one star.

Negative feedback in the app store is the most crushing thing that can happen to an app. 50% of user comments have reason, in this case, you are in a hurry to fix the problems, while negative reviews continue to be collected. And the remaining 50% of comments are groundless, but you still change the development vector to stop the flow of poison emitted by users.

The Android platform is much better, because it does not require approval of changes, but Android users hate to pay for applications, and they are less interested in news applications than Apple App Store buyers. Application development is also different from browser development, as the speed and ability to connect to the Internet changes all the time. The terrible “low connection speed” status, when the device struggles to connect to the network, but it doesn’t work, means to the user only aimless clicks in the application - images and articles simply won't load.

And to get around this, you need to provide fast caching, focus on performance: initialization and load time, and have clear error messages (nothing frustrates more than a blank white screen and a lack of understanding why something doesn't work). If you do not have engineering resources for this, then why not focus on a mobile site instead?

Attracting a user base is expensive and time consuming.

New applications are usually recruited by most users immediately after launch, but then within six months the growth is reduced to zero or goes at a very weak pace.

The most effective marketing strategy for news apps: "Get into the Featured Apps list in online stores from Apple or Google." The problem is that Apple does not create any marketing commitment. So, if you found your app in the Featured Apps list on the App Store, then you probably just got lucky. And this cannot be a business strategy. Therefore, there are two ways to acquire users: spend $$$ on an expensive advertising campaign or place banners on your website that offer to download your application. Both of these solutions are ineffective.

What you get on downloads is lost when you keep customers. You can dial 10 thousand new users, but only less than 30% will return to you more than three times. And over time, the growth goes away. From time to time, you will observe how someone is trying to improve the situation with deep links, but I don’t remember that it gives a good result. The idea that if you put your product in the app store, people will download it and use it all the time, it doesn't work - unless you have Facebook.

Most of your users will not use your application.

The vast majority of people spend 80 percent of their “mobile” time with three applications on their smartphones, and for tablets this number can perhaps be doubled. Here are the applications that have won a place in the lives of most people: Facebook, some kind of music application, and maybe some kind of “newsman”. This means that they will choose their favorite product with a big name (hint: NYT, WSJ, Guardian, BBC, or a news aggregator like Flipboard). That is why the number of downloads is an unreliable criterion. Interest may contribute to the number of downloads, but this does not mean that users will return. Only about a quarter of those who downloaded the app will open it regularly.

This means that your user base for a day or a month turns out to be much less than you might expect. Thus, from 40 thousand downloads you may get about 12-15 thousand active users per month. And besides, you need to invest significant engineering resources in order to make this user base happy with the service. Official stores are cluttered with new applications that are not updated regularly and do not support the features of new operating systems.
Everything that a news application can do is available to a mobile site, only at its best.

Why are you developing a mobile application? To increase the audience? In order to ensure fast download of your content to mobile devices? For a good UI? Everything that a news application can do can also make a website - only better and faster (except if you are ruled by self-admiration - applications that nourish your vanity belong to a different universe where the usual rules of business do not work). If you have a mediocre mobile site, then spend engineering resources to improve it. If you want a stunning design, change the UI of your mobile site.

If the possibility of offline reading passes through the “newsmen” with a red line, then provide this function. If the main reason that you are creating a native application is the ability to offer offline reading, then make a 100% amazing technical solution. This is not easy to achieve, since you need to take into account the conditions of a network connection, a low bandwidth connection, and constantly updated content that must obey a certain hierarchy.

Applications are not magical worlds. They are part of a platform that is unpopular, resource intensive, and is characterized by slow growth. So why not turn to creating mobile sites instead?