Flipboard is an outstanding news and social app that has been ranked top among the top news and magazine apps. This app has earned a distinct name for collecting news from all over the web and converting them into smart magazines that users can customize into their devices to their preferences. While the app’s social networking features and personalization make it popular with young users, its incredible content curation makes it a great option for those who are passionate about particular genres and current affairs.
It is not surprising that the app has appeared on many hot app lists in different digital media. It’s also not surprising that you want to create an app like Flipboard. Since every single upgrade to the app now creates a buzz, it is obvious that the company is aiming high and succeeding in its endeavors.
But first, let’s brush up on what Flipboard is so we can offer you more detailed insights on how to make an app similar to it.
Flipboard: A Brief Introduction
Flipboard is a well-known “smart magazine” app that compiles news from various sources and then generates customized feeds for users. The app, which was first released in July 2010, quickly gained popularity because of its intriguing concept. The sources from which the app gathers its content are already popular with its individual user bases; however, the added benefit of personalization makes it a huge hit with a wider user base. The app already has over a million active users on Android devices and Apple devices to date.
The simple flipping function of this app makes it more engaging and captivating. It also makes it simple for users to catch up on everything they’re interested in without ever feeling sunken by the information. Apart from providing personalized feeds powered by Al, the app allows users to build personal magazines out of the stories they’ve saved for later.
How to start the development process?
The brief explanation provided above should make it clear that creating an app with this many features is no easy task. It will take teamwork, so the simplest thing for you to do is to work with a leading app development company.
Nevertheless, even the latter will demand an advanced strategy. We are approaching this topic to make sure you grasp everything needed from you to make the process effective and economical at every stage.
1. Conduct Industry Research
The first thing you should do is carry out in-depth market research. Despite being one of the most well-known applications in its field, Flipboard is not the only one that can be compared to and improved upon. m. Other well-known applications in the group include Feedly, Inoreader, Pocket, NewsBlur, Digg Reader, and Feedbin, each with its own distinctive selling points. The idea is to learn from each app, taking note of both its shortcomings and its strategies for retaining and expanding its user base. Once that is complete, you can decide which features your new social network app will have.
2. Finalize the features for Flipboard clone app development
Flipboard is a feature-rich app with reliable and robust functionalities, Below is the list of features that you must consider in your app to be similar to Flipboard.
1. Personalized Feeds
Without its ability to create uniquely personalized feeds for users based on not only the interests they have manually selected but also the ones they have demonstrated interest in while exploring the app, the app would not stand out from the hundreds of other news aggregator apps already available on the market. The app’s machine learning algorithm also keeps track of the topics that users spend more time researching than the others, and it ultimately displays more of those subjects to them.
2. News Tagging
The first step in its personalization feature is the tagging capabilities of the app. The genres of all the news that the app collects from different sources are tagged. The dynamic database that results from all this labeled content is then transmitted to the users’ feed in accordance with their chosen interests. The simple tag feature helps the app later apply its machine learning algorithms, which further personalize the content for users to maintain their interest.
3. Content Saving
The app not only gives users control over the content they see but also gives them the option to curate content for later perusal. All of the articles, pictures, and videos that they thought were helpful can be quickly bookmarked and saved under one of the pre-made categories. They can also choose which news to include in their customized magazine.
4. Daily Editions
No news app can now claim to be a news app unless it delivers stories from around the globe to you whether or not you explicitly seek them out. Furthermore, it is unreasonable to expect someone to always be aware of their preferences. For this reason, the discovery part is crucial for you to copy. Users have the option to switch to the feed with all the trending subjects in addition to the personalized feed.
5. Personal Magazine
You can build an interactive personal magazine out of the content you save by grouping it into the appropriate categories. Similar functionality for your app will help you connect users better, retain them longer, and turn them into brand ambassadors who advertise their curatorial work on your platform.
6. Editorial Magazines
On top of the previous feature, the app also offers editorial magazines, where users can post their own publications for other users to view in public. In reality, the majority of the magazines the app offers these days are collections of articles chosen by well-known publicists of the platform. When content curator achieves sufficient popularity, they can start to charge for their subscription, generating a lucrative source of revenue for the app proprietor as well.
7. Social Sharing
Social sharing is a must-have feature for any of its clone apps because it is a social novel app. If you don’t make your app’s content shareable, your users will be limited to manually sharing their curation and other fascinating content, which isn’t the best way to promote a recently developed platform. Instead, concentrate on connecting your app with as many well-known social networks as possible to increase user discoverability.
8. Third-Party Media Integration
Integration with external digital news and content sources is another crucial element without which an app like Flipboard would not function at all. Repeatedly creating content can quickly turn into a burdensome task and expense with no benefits. Instead, you should connect your app with well-known news sources online to simply relay their news and draw more users to your platform by including well-known and reliable sources.
Additional Features to add more value to the app:
When your Flipboard clone app has all the necessary features, you’re ready to meet all the needs and expectations of your prospective users. However, given that Flipboard is already a well-known app, you will undoubtedly encounter face tough competition to attract users to your app. So, it is very important that you provide users with more value if you want your Flipboard clone app to be as effective and even more successful than Flipboard. You can achieve this by providing better services, a better user interface, or some extra features. Here, we’ve compiled a number of features that can help you differentiate your app from the crowd.
1. Community
Due to its user-generated content, the original app is already gaining a lot of popularity. You can elevate it even further by creating a strong community around it. Since the platform has a user base with a broad range of interests, your community will resemble Reddit more than any other small platform. As a result, you will have to deal with big data, so you should consider hiring a big data firm.
2. Smart Gesture Recognition
Smart Gesture Recognition on modern devices is another area where the platform is not beneficial enough. You can enhance the functionality and user-friendliness of the app for your users by combining smart moves like double-swiping, targeted taps, and shape-swiping. Aside from this, it will help you understand the nature of the latest smartphone users, which depend more on gestures to interact with their favorite apps instead of looking for options on the screen to touch and move forward.
3. Users Feedback
Allowing users to leave comments on your platform, will make them feel more heard and boost the quality of your content. You can always grant users (content producers and curators) the authority to handle user feedback; i.e., they can always decide whether to make useful comments on their work visible to the public, accept them in confidence, or ignore them entirely. This freedom will foster a spirit of freedom of speech as well as encourage content creators to use your platform.
4. Develop MVP for a Flipboard-like app
After finalizing all the features of the Flipboard-like app, now is the time to start the development of MVP (Minimum Viable Product). The ideal way of moving forward is the use of Agile Methodology.
The agile methodology for the development of the Flipboard clone app enables you to include MVP development in your project timeline in a seamless manner. Additionally, the iterative approach will help you in advancing your app with time.
5. UI/UX Development
You should employ UI/UX developers as soon as the MVP development process begins so they can start their job simultaneously.
Both teams can perfectly coordinate the completion of their respective tasks to assure there are no compatibility issues.
Make sure you have a thorough understanding of your audience before designing the app’s interface. As already stated, you should include as many gestures as your target audience can use to navigate your app and understand. Make sure you add some aspects to it in ways that most social media networks and their applications do since it is a social news app. Due to their familiarity with the most widely used social media platforms, your users will be better able to grasp the app’s interface and become more engaged with it more quickly.
6. Maintain and Grow
The maintenance and growth of a Flipboard-like app is the final step in the development of a Flipboard clone app. Today users are flexible, and their needs change quickly. Because of this, adopting an agile methodology is crucial if you want to continuously apply user feedback through iterative processes. It is also suggested to make use of cloud technology to keep the app’s scalability. It will be easier for you to increase the number of users, the features of the app, and the development of new functionalities from anywhere and at any time thanks to the distributed processing and storage.
Wrapping Up
Flipboard is one of the most popular smart magazine and news apps available right now. Due to its simple “flipping” gesture and easy content customization, it is a favorite choice of users. If you want to create a similar app like Flipboard that is both beneficial and addictive, requires a team effort. It will require project management experts and skilled professionals in machine learning, networking, and data Processing. The app’s two main functions—personalizing the content and creating an engaging user experience for editors and personal magazines—require the most advanced and diverse skill sets.
So, if you are planning to develop a complex app like Flipboard, a partner will reliable and leading social app development company Tecorb Technologies. Due to years of experience in building a feature-rich mobile application, We have the necessary skills to create a successful and alluring app like Flipboard. Consult with our team to discuss your ideas.
