SpotNews
Project details
The mission of this project is to help users be aware of the latest news while listening to favorite music on Spotify. The user sets up the list of topics of interests and news stations, and whenever there is an update of any of the themes, the music is interrupted for a news release. Editors team provides all updates through the admin panel.
The second release is going to contain an application for journalists and reporters. They have a possibility to record their coverage directly from the venue, add a description, date, and some other settings and publish it. After that editor checks the content and its credibility, the update is published right to the SpotNews users.
I have used The App Solutions for the development of the Spotnews application for Android, including back-end. The App Solutions did not give me the lowest price, but they made the most professional impression – and I have not regretted this choice. After an intensive six months of work we have a system that works exactly as specified and I look forward to many years of further co-operation.
— Carl Lundström
CEO of SpotNews App
Create a mobile news audio streaming platform and incorporate the Spotify player within the application.
Our design team has assembled an intuitive interface for the Spotify player while managing to add more certain functionality. The users also had to receive the possibility to subscribe to the news categories and particular news stations to be able to listen to the news of current interest. The SpotNews is the new kind of media medium that is capable of mass personalization of the preferred media consumption.
The client also requested an admin panel for the news stations. The initial version of the application had to be done on Android mobile platform.
Our Solution
Our team has delivered a solution that complies with all the client’s requirements exactly as they were specified. To be able to leverage the music streaming within the application we had to use the Spotify API.
We have also faced the challenge to create a system that would show good performance while the app is in the state of background execution. Which means that when the user is not actively using an app and just listening to the music, the app is in the state of background execution continues playing music over the lock screen. However, when there is a news update, the app becomes active again.
We have also created a dashboard for the newscasters who would be using the application’s infrastructure to stream their newscast.
Using technology stack
We have created an app for Android operating system. To provide smooth app performance we used Java Android SDK, Retrofit, Fresco, Crashlytics, and Realm.
Spotify SDK ensures the authorization in the application with an existing Spotify profile.
We have also used the Spotify player SDK. This is a library that contains classes for stream management and audio playback. It takes on all negotiation with Spotify`s backend, digital rights management, and decoding.
The Admin Panel that allows to moderate the newsfeed was created using PHP, Silex, MySQL, Composer HTML5, CSS3, Twitter BootStrap, Jquery, Bower, Less, Nginx.
Admin Panel
To provide users with a current newsfeed according to their preferences, the app involves the work of the team of editors. They monitor all the information from the vast amount of resources, sort it and broadcast to the SpotNews channels.
The production process occurs in the admin panel with a user-friendly and handy interface that was created in the close collaboration of our UI/UX designer and the client.
Summary
The service is based on the big consumer’s insight discovered by our customer. From one hand, the habit of listening to the music anytime everywhere has become an integral part of the life. From another hand, the fear of missing out pushes the users to follow the news continuously and refresh their newsfeed every few minutes.
In this way, the key advantage of the service is that the user does not need to follow all the newsfeed. He only sets up the list of interests and channels and receives all the information when there are any updates.
Together with our client, we have created the new type of simple, handy and reliable media channel.
Stay tuned!
Our exciting work with this client gave us an in-depth understanding of radio industry. The main task that we had completed is the communicability and mobility in conditions of time limitations.
Currently, the product is on beta-testing. We are gathering feedbacks and impressions to improve the product.
