One of the things that really bothered us over the last 6 months or so was that it has become extremely tedious and time consuming to well, consume News. With messaging being such a bite sized experience where users jump in and out messaging friends, we wondered if we could build something with a similar feel for News. Messaging by nature is very bite sized. You jump into a chat, post a couple of messages, stickers then jump into another chat and so on. On average our users spending about 1.5 minutes per session so when thinking about News on hike for a mobile first population, it was clear that we had to build something in a bite sized fashion. Something that was quick and easy and gave users easy access to News on their fingertips on the go but also at the same time the opportunity to dive deeper if they wanted to.
We launched News on hike in a very small closed beta in June this year. After getting fantastic early response, we rapidly iterated on it for several months and then launched it to the world. Here’s what it looks like:
Just keep flipping until you’re done. If you want to see more about story just tap on ‘Full Story’ on the bottom bar and voila you get to the source. It’s that simple. When there are more articles that News thinks you’ll like, it’ll ping you with a silent notification. Why silent? We don’t want to annoy you. On average, people open their phones 128 times a day and there will always be a chance for you to see a recent notification from News on hike.
Today we have over a million people using it daily and last week crossed 100 million stories per week. That’s a pretty large number and it just goes to show the big demand for such services on the hike platform.
Next Step. Languages.
This one’s been a big request and we’re super excited to announce that today we are launching News in Hindi!
With a few taps you can now switch to Hindi and News will serve you the best news content from the widest variety of top Hindi news sources. Here’s New in Hindi:
This is the first of many Indian languages that we are launching and will be following up with other languages very soon. In the next couple of months, every Hiker should be able to enjoy news in their own languages just as users can express their emotions via stickers in their own languages.
There’s a lot more we’re working and hope you love the update. Download here – http://bit.ly/hikeforandroid
To all our users reading this post, please keep your feedback coming! It’s the single most important thing that helps us make our product better 