Newspaper Apps

From 2019 to 2026 I worked as a freelancer on the news apps of the Mediahuis newspapers in the north of the Netherlands. One codebase produced the apps for eleven titles: Dagblad van het Noorden, Leeuwarder Courant, Friesch Dagblad, Sikkom and seven local papers, from De Emmer Courant to the Steenwijker Courant.

The app went through three technical generations in those years. I joined on the NativeScript version. The version in Ionic with Angular, which was in the stores from 2020 to 2023, I built and maintained on my own. The move to React Native started in 2023, and with it came a team of four. That app was built around Uitgelicht, the featured tab: eight stories a day picked by the newsroom, shown full screen and swiped through.

My work ran through the whole app. I built Dr. Denker, the digital version of the paper's Christmas puzzle, first in the Ionic app and later again in React Native. The live scores for local matches are mine as well, on iOS as a Live Activity in Swift, and so are the widgets, including the ones for Apple Watch. I contributed to CarPlay. A lot of time also went into the digital newspaper, into rolling out new designs and into keeping the apps working with each new version of iOS and Android.

In 2024 the React Native app was nominated for the INMA Global Media Awards and received two honourable mentions, for Best New Digital Product and for Best Product Iteration among regional brands. A year later Dr. Denker received one in the category Best Idea to Encourage Reader Engagement. According to Mediahuis the puzzle went from almost one million pageviews in 2023 to nearly two million in 2024.

In September 2026 Mediahuis replaced the northern apps with a single app for all of its titles. What is now in the stores as DVHN Nieuws and LC Nieuws is that new app.