Case Study: Building a Mobile Application for TAPinto

Who TAPinto is: Our client since 2015, TAPinto is a network of franchised news sites, delivering up-to-the-minute, local news to over 100 communities. TAPinto serves over 5,500,000 unique users every month, and continues to grow its audience rapidly.

Reason for an App: Over 60% of TAP’s visitors come to the site on mobile devices. TAP saw a mobile app build as an opportunity to better serve their visitors – removing browser elements and producing a native look and feel, and delivering push notifications for important breaking news and great local deals.   

TAP App Rendering
Execution: We wanted to build TAP an app that was more than a non-browser version of the mobile site. We love the mobile site, but like any site that relies on the functionality available in a browser, it has some unavoidable limitations.

A TAP site for a single community can feature dozens of recent, relevant articles across several News Sections (Arts & Entertainment, Government, Sports, etc). In executing the app build, we had to prioritize the ability for visitors to easily and intuitively find the articles they were interested in reading.

We came up with a Swipe function, so that when a visitor selects an article in the app, they can simply swipe through the rest of the articles within the same News Section, then return to the homepage to find articles in other sections.

The app launched earlier this year, and its dedicated audience continues to grow as we fix bugs and make improvements. Says TAPinto founder Mike Shapiro: “Just in the one week we’ve had the app, we’ve seen a lot of positive feedback from readers, and I expect the TAPinto app to grow in popularity in the months and years ahead.”

Read more about our experiences with TAPinto on the Net Theory site, and download the TAPinto App here for iPhone, and here for Android.