The media has long been looking for ways to disrupt the industry, and they’ve tried on just about every channel there is: You can get your news via short videos on Instagram, as disappearing snaps on Snapchat or even via Viber.
But of all the media out there, Quartz has been the only to publish their own app that truly turns the way news are delivered on its head. And in doing so, they showed that revolutionary isn’t necessarily synonymous with complicated.
Download the Quartz app. Turn it on.
Instead of headlines, you get messages, like you’d get from a friend, and you get to interact with them.
It looks like a chatbot, doesn’t it?
But it’s not.
Soon you’ll find you can’t really type anything into it, but you can choose from two predefined actions at the bottom of the screen to tell the app if you want to know more about a certain news item or if you’d like more news delivered.
There is no AI powering this interaction. Just an interface that reminds you of a chatbot, and keeps you up-to-date in an engaging and easily consumable manner.
So the whole app is basically just one screen that tells you the news and redirects you to the relevant news source if you want to read the whole text.
That, as you may have guessed, is not that hard to recreate:
But you also need a place where the editors and journalists can actually input the news, in-text (or video or GIF) form. A simple web app that allows for that would take only 20 man-days to develop.
Now that we’ve figured out there’s no complex AI powering the quartz app, we only admire it more.
It’s a simple and elegant, but still pretty bold solution. And the fact that one just like it can be developed in a month, and for under €23 000 just makes it all the better.
Marko started DECODE with co-founders Peter and Mario, and a decade later, leads the company as CEO. His role is now almost entirely centred around business strategy, though his extensive background in software engineering makes sure he sees the future of the company from every angle. A graduate of the University of Zagreb’s Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, he’s fascinated by the architecture of mobile apps and reactive programming, and a strong believer in life-long learning. Always ready for action. Or an impromptu skiing trip.
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