Today I am proud to announce the launch of our redesigned Guardian app. It’s been a ground-up reworking to bring you a new, advanced and beautiful Guardian app. For the first time you will have a seamless experience across phones and tablets, with a cleaner, responsive design that showcases the Guardian’s award-winning journalism to our readers around the world.
It’s been nearly five years since the Guardian’s first mobile app was unveiled to the world. Since then, our live apps have helped deliver the Guardian’s agenda-setting journalism to every corner of the globe, generating over 1 million downloads and winning multiple awards.
However, the way our readers consume news on mobile devices is evolving dramatically. Today, over 40% of the Guardian’s digital content is accessed via mobiles and tablets, and this percentage is growing. And there are now many times in the week when mobile consumption of our content outstrips desktop consumption.
A couple of years ago, there was much debate in the industry on whether companies needed to have both apps and mobile web. We chose to pursue both.
This has proved the right decision as it has become very clear that apps and mobile web play very different roles in our users’ lives. In particular, apps attract - and create - our most loyal users. Although app users represent only a small percentage of our total global user base, they generate around 20% of our page views. We believe it is critical that we deliver a superior experience, harnessing the greatest elements of native app development, to these highly engaged readers.
Although our current app continues to perform strongly, we took the decision just over a year ago to completely rebuild our live app from the ground up to ensure we continue to offer our readers the most premium experience possible - an experience that is more flexible, live and immersive. And an experience that would look beautiful on all screen sizes - whether smartphone or tablets.
We also wanted to help our journalists to tell their stories in the best possible ways, and so we looked into every nook and cranny to totally reimagine what our app should be like, and how our own technology can enhance our journalism. Put simply, this is an app built for the Guardian’s future.
We’ve been working hard on the new designs and features for over a year, and today it’s great to be able to share the next generation of the Guardian live app, which has been designed and developed by our own staff here at the Guardian. This marks a landmark in our digital journey and for the first time, the app is now fully compatible with iPad and Android tablet devices. The app features a new responsive design, which means it looks consistently fantastic regardless of the device used, and provides live, up-to-the-minute access to all of the Guardian’s agenda setting journalism. The new app can be downloaded at the Apple App Store and Google Play.
We’re also thrilled to announce that GuardianWitness - the Guardian’s award-winning platform through which readers can contribute their own pictures, videos and text - is now integrated into the app, meaning readers can now contribute to assignments seamlessly and directly within the main app.
Other new features include:
- A new flexible layout so we can display different stories in different ways, and show readers which stories are the most important in one glance
- Breaking news and sport alerts and up-to-the-minute live coverage
- Increased personalisation: readers can personalise their home screen depending on what topics they’re most interested in, and create notifications to follow favourite writers, stories, series and football teams
- Improved photo galleries and inclusion of interactives for the first time
- Off-line reading - with intelligent caching readers will now be able to save articles to read later and have more content at their fingertips wherever they are
- Open journalism has been built into the app, with even easier ways for readers to contribute comments, videos, photos via our new GuardianWitness integration, as well as a better commenting experience
- New opportunities for advertisers
On tablets, the new live apps will sit alongside the existing Guardian and Observer Daily Edition apps, which will continue to give readers a newspaper experience available on iPad devices. In short, today’s news means that readers now have the choice to enjoy the Guardian on tablets in the most personal way to them.
The new app, which is compatible with all iOS7 devices and Android mobiles and most tablets running 4.0 (ICS) and above, will remain free to download and use for all readers. Readers can also choose to upgrade to a premium version of the app (£2.49 a month) in order to access daily crosswords and hand-picked articles from the Guardian archive, as well receive as an ad-free experience.
As a digital first news organisation with a proud history of innovation and leading the way, when we set out to redesign and rebuild the app we used years of data from millions of users around the world to learn how they consume and respond to our journalism. This has helped us to produce the best possible product for our readers. Indeed, some Android users will already be familiar with this new look, as we decided to release a beta version of the new app to a group of users to help us develop and design the new version with their input and feedback, which is increasingly how we like to work at the Guardian. For more information on how we develop in the open please see our developer blog.
The involvement of our readers in this process is hugely valuable to us, and it’s an approach we’re also currently taking with the our ongoing work on our website. Thank you to all of those of you have already helped us craft our new apps. We are very proud of what we have achieved with your help. We hope you will be too.
So please download the new app from the Apple App Store or Google Play, take it all in, and let us know your feedback. We hope you enjoy it.
As ever, if you have any questions about the new app, please email userhelp@theguardian.com, or feel free to leave a comment below.
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