For the past six years, we have been building and scaling native apps centrally at Schibsted News Media. We are currently building and maintaining no less than 22 native apps for 13 media brands serving nearly five million users per month.

This has been quite a bold move. Previously, all brands in our large media house were developing apps independently. But there’s a reason why focusing on native apps is important and why we now do this centrally.

Unique, smooth audiovisual experiences our audiences demand

As in product management, one should always start with why. I think it’s important to first dig into why native apps are so important for the future of media brands.

Apps can offer speedy and smooth experiences and features we can’t offer in the same way to people on the Web. We call this “native brilliance.” This is very important, specifically for news apps, for three main reasons:

1. New generations that we don’t reach well enough today have an app-first mentality.

Expectations on usability and design are drawn heavily from using social media apps like TikTok and Snapchat. It’s an engaging visual experience that involves swiping and scrolling through full-sized images, vertical videos, and other interactive elements without navigating too much between front pages, articles, and sections. Apps simply offer that possibility.

2. Apps are typically the place where audio and video are played.

Schibsted has been investing in audio and we continue to do so in product development both within our brands and centrally.

Native apps offer big advantages, including full integration with mobile operating systems, which means people can listen to the player while still being able to browse other content or multi-task with other things. For videos, there is a much smoother experience when it comes to functionalities like Chromecast and Airplay.

Additionally, we recently launched a dedicated TV app for VG’s documentaries and shows for Apple TV. This is built on top of our already existing technological framework.

3. Native apps provide integrations and functionalities that are not possible in the same integrated ways on the Web.

This is great for news apps, as we want to be omni-present for our users. Some examples of this include:

• Push notifications and push toggles insides the product, such as within appropriate article contexts.
• Lock screen and home screen widgets.
• Integration with CarPlay.
• Integration with Siri and Google.

Additionally, apps are an excellent place for interaction and engagement. This is especially great as we know subscribers churn less when engaging more with us.

We have a lot of data that supports this. For example, our app users are more frequent visitors than Web users (regardless of whether they’re logged in or not). There is a bigger share of app users logging in — three times more than Web. Finally, apps are subscriber-heavy; 65% to 100% of premium brand users in the apps are subscribers, which is three to four times more than Web in general.

Why central app development works well for a publisher like Schibsted

Now that we have established why we believe native apps are so important, let’s move onto why and how we have been setting up our native app development centrally.

We have discovered that focusing all app development into two smaller central teams (approximately 15 people divided over one iOS team and one Android team) is a very effective way to build native apps for us.

There are several important reasons for this.

Economies of scale: The first few apps took some time to build as we were building a platform at the same time, but now we can launch a new app within weeks.

Another amazing advantage is that new features that start as small experiments (like Aftenposten’s text-to-speech feature on the Web) can easily be made native and scaled from one to many brands. We nail it, we scale it.

Bundled expertise: We have all expertise around native apps in one place, which has a lot of advantages when it comes to speed of delivery and the quality of the apps we build.

One big advantage is that we have a lot of expertise when it comes to app releases and how Apple and Google handle issues like paywalls. This is far more efficient than every brand building up expertise and relations around things like the App Store guidelines.

Attract and retain tech talent that is hard to find: Back in the day when all of our media brands had a few app developers on their local teams, it was a huge problem if one developer was sick or found a new challenge. It could mean we were not able to fix bugs, or had to postpone important app releases, for a long period of time.

Now that we have central app teams, we see very low churn on our teams. It’s also easier to attract new talent when needed.

Our news products are pretty similar at their core: Of course every media brand is unique and has its own audience. However, if you look with more of a holistic product perspective toward most news apps, the core features needed to give users a great product experience are not hugely different. Where exceptions are needed, we have technology in place that local brand developers can use to make their own native components, which many do.

Building expertise on native apps is a must

I recommend to any bigger publisher to, at the very least, build up knowledge and expertise on native apps in-house.

There are more “accelerating factors” in play at Schibsted than I have words for here. However, it is also helpful to be on the same advertising platform, media streaming solutions, and Web development frameworks and to share editorial tooling for scaling to work smoothly.

We are excited to keep on building the best imaginable news app experiences for millions of Scandinavians! Or as our team slogan says: “We make things appen.”

Many thanks to app product managers Anton Deasismont and Maxim Keijzelman for their input on this article.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .