Media & News January 1, 2020

SKAI News

News app of one of Greece’s biggest broadcasters

Task

Official iOS and Android news app for skai.gr, with personal topic tabs, per-topic alerts, live blogs, a floating video player and smart share links, maintained continuously since 2020

Strategy

No copy of the news: the app reads straight from skai.gr, so journalists publish once and the story appears everywhere at the same moment
Design

Clean editorial white with SKAI Blue #1268FB, and motion kept for the moments that matter: breaking news, live coverage and video
Client

SKAI
Tags

Android, Cloud Functions, Firebase, Flutter, iOS, Media, Push notifications

The skai.gr newsroom, in your pocket.

SKAI News is the official news app of SKAI, one of Greece’s major TV and radio broadcasters. It puts the whole skai.gr newsroom on the phone: top stories, a live news feed, breaking-news alerts, minute-by-minute live blogs, opinion columns, news videos and each morning’s newspaper front pages. It is free, in Greek, on iPhone and Android, and nobody has to sign up. We have designed, built and looked after the app continuously since January 2020. The current release is 6.9.8.

skai.gr publishes all day across 16 categories, runs live blogs for big events, and produces video and opinion alongside the news. Showing all of it to everyone buries the stories each reader actually cares about. Alerting everyone about everything trains people to switch notifications off.

Readers needed a way to follow their own topics and get alerts only for those, without creating an account. Shared stories had to open properly on the other person’s phone. And the newsroom could not run a second publishing system just for the app.

The first time the app opens, it quietly creates an anonymous profile in the background. From then on, favourite topics become their own tabs and alert choices are remembered, with no email and no password. Favourites and alert settings are stored in the cloud, and any change reaches the open app immediately.

The app has no content database of its own. Everything comes straight from skai.gr: articles, categories, top and popular stories, breaking news, live blogs, opinions and videos. When the newsroom renames or reorders a category on the site, the app follows. The app team can also change parts of the layout remotely, with no store update: whether videos appear on Home, compact or full story cards, text sizes, summaries, and the links to SKAI’s other apps.

The main navigation is a row of tabs you can swipe across: Home, Feed, your favourite categories, Popular, Front Pages and Videos. Favourites are chosen from a grid of photo tiles with a simple + / ✓ toggle, and every favourite becomes its own tab. Home mirrors the skai.gr front page: the lead story large, the editors’ top stories, a rotating Opinions band, the latest videos and a short section for each category. A story never appears twice.

When the newsroom marks a story as breaking, a bold red banner appears at the top of Home. The app checks for new breaking news every three minutes. For big events a story becomes a live blog, with a pulsing red LIVE BLOGGING label and a timeline of updates that refreshes itself every minute, so readers never have to pull to refresh.

Tapping play slides the player up from the bottom while the page behind it blurs. Swipe it down and it shrinks into a mini-player bar, so the reader can keep browsing while the video plays. Turn the phone sideways and it goes full-screen. The screen stays awake during playback, and the video pauses when the reader leaves the app.

Readers choose which categories may send them alerts, with one main switch for all of them. The newsroom sends alerts per category, and each one reaches only the readers who follow that category, with the article’s photo attached on both iPhone and Android. Tapping an alert opens the story directly, even if the app was closed.

Sharing a story or a video creates a link that appears as a rich preview card (headline, summary, image) in WhatsApp, Viber, Messenger and similar apps. If the person receiving it has the app, the link opens that exact story or video in the app. If not, it takes them to the App Store or Google Play. When Google shut down its old link service, we moved the app to a new link system in 2026.

Each day’s Greek newspaper front pages, split into political and sports papers, open in a full-screen gallery you can swipe through and pinch to zoom. Header shortcuts lead to the rest of the SKAI family: the SKAI TV and SKAI 100.3 radio apps, Sport FM and the weather.

The app reads straight from the skai.gr content feed and keeps no content of its own. A journalist publishes once, and the story appears on the website and in the app together. Every article opened in the app is counted in skai.gr’s reading statistics, which is what feeds the Popular list.

Everything personal and everything remote-controlled lives in Firebase. An anonymous identity recognises each reader. Cloud Firestore holds favourites, alert choices and the layout switches, and every open app updates the moment one of them changes. Alerts go through Firebase Cloud Messaging, one topic per category, with a small cloud function attaching the article photo. Share links are served from Firebase Hosting, with a preview page for messaging apps and a hand-off to the app or the store.

The video player sits above every screen rather than inside one, which is why a video keeps playing while the reader moves around the app.

Design, development and maintenance have all been ours since January 2020. Along the way:

Four text sizes that apply to every article, a gentle rate-the-app prompt after about ten launches, and all the legal pages a broadcaster needs, including protection of minors and the yearly state-advertising statement. The current release is 6.9.8 (build 4056).