ThisDay + Huawei Apps UP

Our aim of making sure that history, art, culture and heritage becomes accessible to billions across the globe is an ambitious yet achievable goal. The journey though is a different story altogether.

In Feb this year, we launched our mobile web platform with a bunch of storytellers coming on board to tell thousands of stories.

Since then, we have built partnerships with some of the largest publishing houses in the country including Times Internet, Hindustan Times and InShorts. In addition to that, our platform now sees close to 250k visitors daily. We are humbled and thankful to all our partners for this amazing growth and for being part of this journey!

After hitting these metrics, the natural course of action was to create native applications for Android and iOS that people can keep in their phones and consume stories seamlessly. The UI was done and the functionalities for the first cut of the application were finalised and the team was gung-ho to start the dev process. It was around this time that Huawei announced its Apps UP challenge and we got started on that immediately.

The Apps UP challenge presented us with an opportunity to not only create the application but also become part of the Huawei App Gallery - which gives us a global reach over millions of users instantly! The only caveat was that we had to integrate HMS components into our application.

After going through the details provided, we finalized the following modules for immediate integration:

1. HMS Core
2. HMS Ads
3. HMS Analytics
4. HMS Push

Our aim was to build the entire app in Flutter as it would help in porting it to the iOS version later and the integration of the HMS kits in Flutter posed a set of initial challenges. The kits in themselves are amazing as they let us achieve practically everything that we need to track and analyse and perform for ensuring the best user experience.

All in all, we were able to build an amazing application with support from the Huawei India dev team and are now live on the App Gallery. The next steps include monitoring the user traction and adding more features that we are sure our users will love and enjoy!