The goal of the project was to improve the overall performance of the Te Ao Māori News App, deliver a seamless user experience and provide flexibility for future growth of the app.

The previous WebView-based app had significant limitations, simply loading the web version of the Te Ao Māori News website inside a mobile wrapper. The key challenges with this approach were:

1. Performance Issues: WebView technology can be slow and clunky because it depends on loading HTML content in a web browser embedded within the app. This led to long load times, especially when displaying rich media content such as images and videos.

2. Poor Native Experience: The app was unable to take full advantage of native mobile features like push notifications, native navigation and smooth video playback. These all led to a subpar user experience.

3. Limited Flexibility: WebView was not capable of supporting new and innovative features - it was not flexible enough to support the future roadmap.

4. Analytics: The WebView app was unable to capture analytics for video views.

The rebuild of the app aimed to address these issues. React Native was chosen as the solution due to its ability to deliver a native mobile experience across both Android and iOS with a single codebase.

The React Native app allowed us to leverage many native features that were impossible to achieve with the WebView approach. New features introduced included: push notifications, infinite scrolling, top tab bar navigation, in-App video playback with analytics.

React Native’s component-based architecture provided a module and maintainable codebase. The development team could easily manage different screens and features by breaking them into reusable components. The transition from WebView to React native resulted in significant improvements across several key audience and performance metrics.

The significant increases in unique users and engagement were all driven organically by improved functionality without marketing behind it. The user base for the mobile apps is expected to grow as more features are added and users are encouraged to switch from web to app.