Mobile Apps and Architecture

Scouted News launched as a traditional website, users would visit the homepage and content would be requested from the server on-demand. Scouted Media found that users who found the site liked it, but convincing them to come back regularly was challenging.

Our research found that the majority of people prefer to consume news through apps rather than websites, and that users are more likely to become repeat users if they have installed an app rather than just visited a website.

In order to support mobile apps, the site needed a new architecture.

Probable proposed an “offline-first” architecture for Scouted, where content would be saved on device, and then requests for new articles would happen in the background. This allowed for two major improvements:

1. Return users would experience instant loading times
2. Offline users could view the last content which had loaded

To support this, we took the original site, which had a Django backend and a template-based page design, and implemented the Django REST Framework to provide an API. We then developed three new clients:

• Next.js app to replace the website
• SwiftUI app for iPhone, iPad and Mac
• Jetpack Compose app for Android phones, tablets and Chromebooks

The new backend architecture was deployed on Scouted’s Azure-based infrastructure.

The mobile apps delivered the retention boost Scouted was looking for, and the new architecture delivered a major performance boost and a more sustainable platform for Scouted’s future development.