PHNews
A native iOS and Android news reader that turns scattered RSS sources into a personalised, distraction-light reading experience with offline access and audio support.
Average daily usage
Readers stayed engaged long enough for the product to become part of a repeat news habit.
30-day retention
Strong retention signalled that the product was useful beyond initial curiosity downloads.
Personalised feed logic that helps readers cut through noisy source lists
Native mobile builds for a smoother reading experience on both platforms
Offline and text-to-speech support for more flexible daily consumption
Each project here is framed around the operational or product shift it created, not just the tooling behind it.
The Challenge
News readers were pulling content from too many places and spending too much effort just trying to keep up. A better product needed to gather multiple sources into one reading environment, surface the most relevant content, and keep the experience clean enough that users would come back daily instead of bouncing between noisy apps, browsers, and notifications.
Our Solution
We built PHNews as a native mobile news product for both iOS and Android. Instead of treating aggregation as a plain feed dump, the app organised sources, categories, reading history, and preferences into a more deliberate reader experience. Users could browse a personalised news feed, save content, listen with text-to-speech, and continue reading offline. Building the product natively helped us create a smoother reading flow and better device-level performance than a generic cross-platform content shell.
Outcome
PHNews became a high-usage reading product rather than a passive content utility. The app passed 100,000 downloads, maintained a 4.7-star average rating, and reached 18 minutes of average daily usage with 42% 30-day retention. Those numbers point to something more important than reach: users kept returning because the product made daily reading simpler and more enjoyable.
Key Figures
100K+
Downloads
PHNews reached more than one hundred thousand installs across iOS and Android.
18 min
Average daily usage
Readers stayed engaged long enough for the product to become part of a repeat news habit.
42%
30-day retention
Strong retention signalled that the product was useful beyond initial curiosity downloads.
What We Shipped
Stack
Need something similar?
We design and build iOS, Android, Flutter, and operational web products for businesses that need reliability after launch as much as speed before it.
