SpotNews

Project details

The mission of this project is to help users stay aware of the latest news while listening to their favorite music on Spotify. Users set up a list of topics of interest and news stations and whenever there is an update of any topic, the music is interrupted for the news release. The editorial team provides all updates through the admin panel.

The second release will have an app for journalists and reporters. They have the ability to record their coverage directly from the location, add a description, date and some other settings and publish it. After that editor checks the content and its reliability, the update is published immediately to SpotNews users.

I used App Solutions to develop the Spotnews app for Android, including the backend. App solutions didn’t give me the lowest price, but they gave the most professional impression – and I don’t regret this choice. After six months of intensive work, we have a system that works exactly as specified and I look forward to many more years of cooperation.

Create a mobile news audio streaming platform and incorporate Spotify player in the app.

Our design team has put together an intuitive interface for the Spotify player while also managing to add certain functionalities. Users should also receive the ability to subscribe to news categories and specific news stations to be able to listen to news of interest. SpotNews is a new type of media capable of mass personalizing preferred media consumption.

The client also requested an admin panel for news stations. The initial version of the application must be made on the Android mobile platform.

Our solution

Our team has come up with a solution that complies with all the customer’s requirements exactly as they were specified. To be able to take advantage of in-app music streaming, we must use the Spotify API.

We also created a dashboard for broadcasters who will use the app’s infrastructure to stream their newscasts.

Use the technology stack

We have created an application for the Android operating system. To provide smooth application performance, we used Java Android SDK, Retrofit, Fresco, Crashlytics and Realm. The Spotify SDK ensures in-app authorization with an existing Spotify profile.

We also used the Spotify Player SDK. This is a library that contains audio playback and stream management classes. It takes care of all the negotiations with Spotify’s backend, digital rights management, and decryption.

The admin panel allows moderation of news feeds that have been created with PHP, Silex, MySQL, Composer HTML5, CSS3, Twitter BootStrap, Jquery, Bower, Less, Nginx.

Admin panel

To provide users with a current news feed according to their preferences, the application involves the work of the editorial team. They track all the information from huge resources, organize it and broadcast it to SpotNews channels.

The production process takes place in the admin panel with a convenient and user-friendly interface created in close collaboration between our UI/UX designers and the client.

Summary

This service is based on major consumer insights discovered by our customers. On the one hand, the habit of listening to music anytime, anywhere has become an indispensable part of life. On the other hand, fear of missing out motivates users to follow the news continuously and refresh their news feed every few minutes.

Together with our customers, we have created a new type of communication channel that is simple, convenient and reliable.