The paper on a phone

The official mobile client for Leadership Newspaper, one of Nigeria's national dailies. It carries the whole paper onto a phone.

The reader

Content and media. A personalised "For You" feed alongside top news, cover stories, a news-flash carousel, most-read and trending sections, and category browsing. A WhatsApp-style stories system with multi-frame auto-advancing playback and progress bars. Short-form vertical video reels, long-form playback across native and YouTube sources, and a stock-market overview with a live ticker and charts. A digital e-paper reader rendering paginated PDF issues of the printed newspaper.

Engagement. Commenting with replies and likes, bookmarking, reading history, sharing, deep links and push notifications, with optimistic updates on bookmarks and comments so interaction never waits on the network.

Personalisation. Dark, light and auto theming with persisted preference and typed colour tokens; font family and size selection; notification and topic preferences; and a custom i18n layer covering seven locales — English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba. Guest-first access with a full auth stack behind it. Also: Wordle, Sudoku and Crossword through an in-app web view.

AI reading aids

Google Gemini generates short summaries, key-point bullets and deeper insight analysis on demand, across gemini-2.5-flash, gemini-2.5-pro and gemini-2.0-flash, with streaming generation and a client-side summary cache so a re-read costs nothing.

Under the reader

Offline-first reading. TanStack Query state persisted to MMKV for 24 hours, so the app opens with real articles on a cold start or a dead connection instead of spinners. Five-minute stale time with an offline-friendly refetch policy.
A singleton axios client centralises base URL, timeout, JWT attachment, token-expiry buffering, global 401 handling and normalised ApiException errors. Screens never touch axios directly.
A custom i18n layer built in-house (I18nContext, dot-notation keys, interpolation) rather than pulling in a library. It drives every string across seven locales, including three Nigerian languages.
A provider tree ordered deliberately (ErrorBoundary → GestureHandlerRootView → PersistQueryClientProvider → ThemeProvider → I18nProvider → AlertProvider), with a custom animated splash playing over the native black splash while fonts and assets load, so there is no white flash on launch.
Memory and performance work as first-class services: a performanceMonitor, an AggressiveMemoryCleanup pass, FlashList virtualisation, memoised components and skeleton loaders. A news app renders long image-heavy lists continuously and will leak if nobody owns it.
A five-tab shell with deep linking maps leadershipnews:// and https://leadership.ng URLs onto tabs and detail screens.
PDF e-paper rendering via react-native-pdf + react-native-blob-util. It reproduces the printed page layout on a phone.

Status

Live on the App Store and Google Play at v1.0.0.