CASE STUDY · MEDIA & PUBLISHING
Ad-free news reading with micropayments
As part of the client’s mobile engineering team, we helped build and scale a consumer app that lets readers access premium journalism from many publishers without ads or paywalls, paying a few cents per article from an in-app wallet.
iOS + Androidnative apps from a single codebase
3ways to pay: card, in-app purchase and subscription
4environments: development, QA, performance and production
2+ yearsof continuous feature releases
THE CHALLENGE
What needed to happen
Readers are tired of ads and of paying for a separate subscription to every publication. The client set out to offer a different model: one app, many publishers, and a small payment per article from a shared wallet, with ways to earn credit by engaging with brands. Making that work meant a fast, personalised feed, frictionless payments that respect both app-store rules and card payments, and a growth and analytics stack strong enough to support a venture-backed consumer launch.
WHAT WE DELIVERED
Pay for what you read,
earn for what you share.
Personalised news feed
- A curated feed of articles from many publishers
- Personalised recommendations based on reading behaviour
- Publisher and magazine-style collections
- Full articles without ads or paywalls
- Native and embedded video playback
- A library and history of everything a reader has unlocked
Micropayment wallet
- Pay-per-article unlocking from a prepaid wallet
- Top-ups by card and through app-store in-app purchases
- Subscription plans as an alternative to pay-as-you-go
- Refund flows and an always-visible balance
- Secure handling of payment and account tokens
Earn & rewards
- Brand offers that reward readers with credit
- Multiple-choice surveys with instant rewards
- Consent-based bank account linking through a financial data aggregator
- Friend referrals through contacts, SMS and share links
Onboarding & identity
- Sign in with Apple, Google or Facebook
- SMS and email verification
- App-tracking and notification permission journeys
- Remote configuration and forced-update prompts
Growth & analytics stack
- Install attribution and deep links
- Lifecycle messaging and push notifications
- Product analytics and session replay
- Crash and error monitoring across releases
ENGINEERING & OPERATIONS
- TypeScript and Redux Toolkit across a large, modular codebase
- Over-the-air updates to ship fixes without waiting for app-store review
- GitHub Actions pipelines for linting, pull-request checks and scheduled QA and performance builds
- Automated tests with Jest, React Native Testing Library and mocked APIs, with coverage reporting
- High-performance list rendering for long, image-heavy feeds
- Pre-commit hooks and strict lint rules to keep a large team consistent
- Separate development, QA, performance and production configurations
WHAT IT MADE POSSIBLE
- A new way for readers to access premium journalism without ads or multiple subscriptions
- Payments that work across card, in-app purchase and subscription models
- Additional ways for readers to earn credit and for brands to reach them
- A release process that let a distributed team ship continuously for more than two years
- A codebase backed by automated tests, monitoring and performance tooling
TECHNOLOGY
Tools we used
React NativeTypeScriptRedux ToolkitStripeIn-app purchasesFirebaseSentryAppsFlyerIterableRecombeeCodePushLottieJestTesting LibraryMSWGitHub Actions
Client name and confidential details withheld.MORE WORK
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