Wildcard - Curated News App

Wildcard brings curated news updates in the form of cards from various reliable sources. The application is provided by Coopkanics and is available for free in the Google Play Store with no In-app purchases.

Wildcard Screenshots

Similar stories from various sources are organized as cards showing summary. These summaries make easy for the users to quickly update themselves about the news stories especially when they are busy.

You can read the news in detail and if you view the news as a card the loading time is negligible. The users can save the cards or individual news articles to read later.

Great day Readers. Doug Petkanics, Co-Founder, and VP Engineering responded with the answers to give us more insights into the application and its development.

1. Tell us about the team?
Our team is made up of product folks, designers, and developers and we've built both our Android and iOS apps entirely in-house. One software engineering team member was largely responsible for doing the Android client implementation, however, he collaborated tightly with the design. Wildcard is built on top of our data platform which enables us to try and turn any URL or web page into a card to be rendered natively on iOS or Android. The majority of our team works on the data problems and tooling related to this platform.

2. What was your inspiration that leads to the creation of Wildcard?
Wildcard was inspired by the idea of trying to create the best content discovery and consumption experience on the phone. There are challenges with both the mobile web consumptive experience and the native app store discovery and distribution mechanics, so we built Wildcard as a middle path for accessing the breadth of content on the web, contained within the experience of a native app.

3. What was the biggest challenge faced while developing Wildcard?
We have faced a lot of challenges while developing Wildcard from the data structuring end of the stack all the way up through creating a great client experience. In the Android app, in particular, it took us a couple iterations to find a good balance between balancing responsible data usage and battery usage with background fetch policy and keeping the app up to date.

4. What features can be expected in the upcoming updates?
We're experimenting on iOS around letting users customize Wildcard to see more of the content that they care about. When we get the user experience right we'll work to bring that ability to Android.

5. Is there anything else you want to tell our readers?
Thanks for trying Wildcard. I hope you enjoy it, and we welcome feedback and feature requests at any time through support@trywildcard.com.
Get it on Google Play

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