We work continuously on the improvement of existing functionalities and features as well as on the introduction of new integrations, which make our platform more exciting and interesting for the users and more efficient and successful for editors and clients.
The further development of our platform always happens in close coordination with our customers and their requirements. We are therefore happy to share some considerations regarding our upcoming product development. Of course, timings can always change for different reasons. Nevertheless, this list is a good point of reference. If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to contact us!
Push Notifications
Sending push notifications to users is a central benefit from our point of view and an absolute USP of native apps. There are already several ways to send pushes to channels and users. For example: push to all users of the app, push to all users of a particular channel or pushes in connection with chat (in chat groups or in 1:1 chats).
We are currently planning to implement so called “Push Topics” for single channels or for all users of the app in order to give users the possibility to simply subscribe to or manage individual Push Topics in the app as per their interest. That enables users to personalize pushes to suit their needs. On the other side it enables clients to structure push content in a more sophisticated way.
Additionally we plan to extend the analytics from push notes displayed in the dashboard, so that clients have a clear overview about the success of each push message.
TIMING: End of 2nd Quarter
Audio
Podcasts are a big hype nowadays. And we think: for good reasons! Hence we have already introduced native audio cards. Using a special audio teaser, audio streams of any length can be started or paused directly via a simple player in the news feed. This can be used for all types of audio content – from podcasts to music. The audio stream can also be listened to after closing the app – just like a podcast.
In the next step we plan to make this even more exciting! User will be enabled to bookmark and download audio feeds, so that they can listen to them at anytime – also when they are offline (just like in a podcast app.)
Plus: we will build a podcast integration, that lets you automatically import any podcast that provides a proper feed (essentially podcasts are based on RSS, so this is very straight forward). Editors will be enabled to subscribe to podcasts and decide which audio feeds will flow into their backend, where they can comment, edit and publish them!
TIMING: 3rd Quarter
Teaser Templates
On our platform content is organized in “cards”. We cover all relevant content formats with different card types – from social posts to articles and links, from native audio to video or text. In order to make the news feed even more exciting and varied, we have recently introduced so-called “teaser templates” for article cards. The link to any web content or URL is a core feature of our platform. There have been already different options based on the existing content elements (e.g. picture, intro text etc.). Now editors can choose between small and large teasers as well as special teasers like picture plus headline.
To make this even more useful we will provide the option to automatically set teaser templates for dedicated mixes or integrations. That means all article cards inside a specific mix or that are provided via a specific integration will use a certain template.
Your news feed will look amazing – with almost no work!
TIMING: 3rd Quarter
Personalized News Feed
A particularly exciting feature for use cases with a lot of daily content (e.g. news apps) is the option to let users personalise their news feed in a simple way. At the moment we are thinking in the following direction: the user can “follow” an entire channel or individual mixes in a channel (e.g. as in the app of Medium). The news feed is then aggregated from the channels or mixes that the user follows.
The existing content structure of mixes and channel is the perfect basis, while the user can choose the most exciting feeds for himself from the multitude of contents. In the personalized news feed, user would only see the content from mixes he follows.
In the long run we believe that the personalisation of news feeds based on additional logics (e.g. algorithms) is an exciting topic. There are exciting services and start-ups that could be integrated. The technical requirements on our side are perfect for this. Anyhow we believe that personalised news only make sense if there is enough content that users can filter from.
TIMING: End of 4th Quarter
Image Galleries
Images can already be integrated and managed in different ways. In the future, we will also integrate the possibility of creating picture galleries natively and making them consumable for users using swipeable image galleries. This principle has already been considered as standard and can also be implemented well within the framework of our card-based approach.
TIMING: 3rd Quarter
New Format: Full Post (= Longread)
Thats a feature that not only publishers, but also other clients are asking for: The native integration of long text posts in the news feed within the framework of text and picture cards. For such longer text “posts” we plan – analogous to a post in slack – the introduction of a longer article format with picture and text. This makes it possible to integrate longer articles into the apps in a completely native way. They will load fast and enrich the native app experience we are providing.
Technically we will use the already existing text card and enlarge the maximum amount of characters. The behaviour in the app will depend upon length of text (similar to the way Facebook apps are handling that).
TIMING: End of 2nd Quarter
New Integrations
We are currently planing some new standard integrations, which should especially facilitate the import of structured data formats such as JSON or XML outside of special “custom integrations”. This is a requirement that we encounter again and again and for which there are different approaches. The aim is to make the integration of existing data sources even easier – without the technical necessity of IT integration.
TIMING: 3rd and 4th Quarter
Extension of Chats
We plan to improve and extend the real time chat with features that will make the exchange and discussion of content in chat groups or 1:1 chats easier and more efficient. Integrations can be used to integrate content feeds into any chats in the sense of a content chat bots. We also plan to offer new APIs to implement third party services in chats (e.g. for translations)
In addition, there will soon be even easier ways to move and share content in the app between “mixes” and chats. We are also planning functions in the sense of chat bots as well as central chat features such as broadcast messages to all users.
TIMING: 3rd Quarter
In-App Messaging
We believe in the power of Google´s Firebase platform. Therefore we are happy that Google has decided to extend the platform with an extended integration of analytics but also with more exciting features, which our customers will benefit from in the future.
With so-called “In-App Messaging”, editors can send flexible notifications to users even during the active use of an app. This can be used for different goals. In-App Messaging is therefore a variant or supplement of classic push notifications that are sent via Firebase Cloud Messaging.
Firebase can be used to link in-app messages with analytic data so that messages can be sent based on profile data (such as language, app version or country), current behavior (purchases, screens visited, buttons clicked) or predicted future behaviour (engagement rate, migration risk).
TIMING: 3rd Quarter