While the world is growing increasingly mobile, almost all of that time is spent on apps (88%) instead of browsers.

Apps

• Offer a more branded, seamless experience
• Keep people more engaged with features like notifications, personalisation and offline access
• Develop more loyal audiences because they don’t depend on Search

Regardless of how you earn revenue, apps offer unique ways to earn even more revenue:

• Ad revenue: Personalisation allows for more accurate ad targeting
• Reader revenue: More time spent means more opportunities to offer subscriptions, donations or memberships

Building a mobile app isn’t easy for most news organisations. If you’re considering launching an app, ask yourself:

• Resources: Does your organisation have engineering and product talent? If not, can you hire an employee or contractor?
  
  
• Technical expertise: If you have the right talent, do they know multiple coding languages that might be used for iOS and Android?
  
  
• Data: Do you already collect, analyse and use data about your audience?

What is the Flutter News Toolkit?

The Flutter News Toolkit helps news organisations reduce the time, resources and talent needed to build news apps for both iOS and Android.

Just like how Google Docs has templates for resumes, where you can easily remove lines or add new sections, the Flutter News Toolkit is a template for mobile news apps. Publishers have full control over their apps, but can still get started quickly.

The Flutter News Toolkit

• Includes common design features and best practices found across news apps
• Helps you publish your app across iOS, Android and other platforms, all from one place
• Easily integrates with Google Ad Manager and AdMob and in-app purchases for subscriptions

Get started with the Flutter News Toolkit

1. Tell your developer you’d like to create an app using the Flutter News Toolkit and link them to the GitHub library and Quick Start video
2. Email us if you need recommendations on agencies to help launch or customise your app

The Flutter News Toolkit allows you to have common design features and best practices found across news apps, like:

• Using push notifications to encourage app visits
• Recommending content with recirculation sections to increase engagement
• Adding newsletter sign-ups across your app to grow newsletter subscribers

News organisations have used Flutter to:

• Save time. The Standard News reported time savings of up to 80%.
• Grow ad revenue. Hespress reported 50% growth in ad revenue.