News Mobile App Development
for Israeli Financial Media
Native mobile applications for iOS and Android to get timely financial market news in the most convenient and highly visual way.
Challenge
That was a news mobile app development project for Haaretz Newspaper — one of the leading newspaper publishers in Israel today.
They got in touch with Mbicycle’s CEO to discuss their next app — Finance TheMarker — that would extend their online news portal targeting the financial services industry. This application was to give traders and investors convenient and simple access to real-time financial market data in order for them to efficiently manage their assets.
So why did Haaretz Newspaper choose our team for this project? Well, they needed experts proficient in both mobile development and digital data visualization. The Mbicycle team already had successful experience implementing the iOS Charts library for the ShotTracker app suite, and that was convincing enough for Haaretz Newspaper to trust us with this task.
Solution
First, we started out with an MVP of the future application. Once it was successfully demoed to the client, we got the list of features and set out on implementing them both for the iOS and Android versions.
During this news mobile app development process, Mbicycle’s experts released the following features according to the client’s requirements:
- User login and registration
- Charts and graphs, both replicated from the client’s website and developed from scratch, including visualizations of Dow Jones and NASDAQ international indexes, currency rates, as well as Israeli stock market indexes such as TA-35, TA-90, TA-125.
- Newsletter subscription, for the app users to get the latest financial and business news, both regional and global.
As Haaretz Newspaper already had a website where their readers could get timely financial market news, we retained their approach to presenting the news in the mobile app UI. Using the iOS Charts library and other frameworks, we made the information in the mobile app easy to access and consume.
As the majority of the Finance TheMarker app users were from Israel, we provided two versions of the application — one in English and the other in Hebrew, with the navigation and content displayed from right to left on each screen.
Process
During this fast-paced project, requirements were changing frequently and new features were added in the process. That’s why our team used Scrum as their Agile methodology of choice, with daily meetings to keep everyone in the loop about the news mobile app development progress.
The Finance TheMarker project team consisted of Mbicycle’s professionals with Haaretz Newspaper’s CTO as the product owner and included:
- Project manager
- iOS developer
- Android developer
- QA engineer
All in all, it took us eight months to develop the full-featured iOS and Android applications that met all of the client’s requirements.
Technologies & Tools
Programming languages
Objective-C, Java
Architecture
MVC
Third-party libraries & frameworks
AFNetworking, iOS Charts, Core Data
Results
After eight months of proactive mobile app development, our client was very satisfied with the result and left highly positive feedback about Mbicycle as a mobile app development outsourcing company. Through their references, we landed another project with an Israeli startup, Agritask, to build an app for the agriculture industry.
Besides, the experience and accolades we gained on the Finance TheMarker project helped our company win several new customers from the fintech industry, including Vietnam-based VPBank.
