Univision

Mobile Apps
Development
Technical Strategy

Introduction

News and media has truly become a mobile platform, with 58% of adults getting news on a mobile device.

Mobile as the medium for news is more important than ever, and nobody knows it more intimately than Univision, the news and media company for Hispanic and Latino Americans. They provide a constant stream of news covering every conceivable topic, from current events to world news to sports. Viewers and readers can find them on television, on the web, and on mobile.

We worked with Univision to completely replatform their mobile apps to allow them more control over what viewers see, faster updates, and the ability to quickly expand and serve more markets across the country.

30%

Reduction in app engineering time for all mobile apps

2 wks

Between production deployments, down from 6 months

5+

Cross-platform components built to work across both web and native mobile

Execution

We needed to reduce the time between releases while simultaneously minimizing the codebase that had grown large and complex over time.

This ended up being no small task; we were looking to reduce the total lines of code by about half and get the time between releases down from 6 months. As part of this rearchitecture, we also wanted to provide a platform that gave the Univision development team a path forwards—allowing them to easily migrate other apps or spin up new ones on the same core code used for all other Univision apps.

We worked closely with their internal development team to unwind years of code and decisions, to understand their existing architecture. Our team broke apart two of their three biggest mobile apps to understand media, advertising, news, and integrations, building a new architecture plan and road map for execution.

Over the next eight months, using this knowledge gained in the first weeks of our discovery, our team redeveloped the entire mobile platform from the ground-up. The internal Univision team worked alongside us, allowing a smooth transition to their in-house developers following completion of our work with them.

Highly componentized system allowing easy creation of new app elements
Unified styles, interactions, and information handling between Android and iOS platforms
Reduced overall code base size by approximately 50%
Replatformed the top three mobile apps onto a unified codebase