taz

The digital taz is made by people with great passion. Since the beginning of our collaboration, the developers of ctrl.alt.coop have enriched and advanced our team considerably with their creativity, reliability and open-mindedness. Our cooperation is characterized by great trust and appreciation.

Lena Kaiser
Project coordinator, taz

For over a year now we have worked together with the German daily newspaper die tageszeitung (taz) , creating a new Android app for reading the newspaper. With the upcoming release on 14.09.2020, we look back at the project.

According to today’s fast-paced spirit, the taz had set themselves the task to develop an app which foregrounds the digital medium. We are very happy that we could help them to do so. The new app is no longer based on the PDFs produced for creating the printed newspaper, but on a new section navigation logic implemented in native Android. This makes it easy to navigate between articles, adjust display options such as font size to your own needs and share articles or mark them for later reading. Issues are stored locally to allow offline reading and are only updated when changes occur.

The more complex tasks in this app included a favourable download scheduling, an integration of push notifications, the manual writing of database migrations and, last but not least, various UI challenges, including complex nesting of scroll containers, implementation of a date selection and a night mode.

The app had to also provide the new taz-ID and the possibility for users to convert their login.

The app communicates with the backend infrastructure of taz via a GraphQL interface. We also use a Sentry instance to reliably track errors.

Of course, we also followed our development best practices such as continuous integration and short release cycles for this project.

The taz neo app is available under a free license and the source code can be reviewed on github .

Android

Kotlin

Gitlab