RTÉ app makes it easier to customise news

RTÉ’s “refresh” of its News Now app is based on “feedback from users”, it says, with the changes intended to give greater prominence to breaking news and make it easier to navigate across news categories.

The home screen of the RTÉ News Now app has been rejigged so that it no longer features stories from a mix of categories (with the result that sport and entertainment had more or less equal prominence with "harder" news), but instead concentrates on national and international news.

Individual sections including Nuacht, Sport, Entertainment, Business and Weather are now visible along the top of the app, while the app has also made it easier for users to “edit the menu items to only display sections that interest you”.

RTÉ said the shift in its visual design, which includes greater use of colour, large lead images and branding, was intended to “make the app feel more at home alongside the RTÉ News Now television channel”.

The app was designed by the in-house team in RTÉ Digital, the division of RTÉ headed by Múirne Laffan, and was developed in partnership with Dublin-based firm Ammeon, with push notifications and real- times analytics technology provided by Galway-based start- up Element Wave.

It has been downloaded more than 1.4 million times since its release in January 2010, with some 336,000 downloads, or 24 per cent of the total, made by users based outside Ireland.

During the first half of 2015, the RTÉ News Now app had an average of 372,000 daily unique browsers and 49 million page views per month. In June alone, 384,000 unique browsers used the app daily, delivering almost 51 million page views.

According to a survey by research firm Behaviour & Attitudes, a quarter of adults living in Ireland have used the RTÉ News Now app, with usage being highest among 35-49-year- olds at 36 per cent.