ESPN STARS
A native Android app serving region-specific sports news to the Eastern Pacific, Indonesia included — built for the handsets and bandwidth people there actually had.
Numbers
- 3
- Team size
- 4 months
- Build time
Problem
ESPN needed to serve sports news to fans in Singapore and Indonesia, where the audience and the devices were both different from the US ones its existing products were built around.
The project also lost its mobile developer partway through, which is how I came to it.
Solution
A custom native Android application built for regional news, templating the content with Mustache so the feed could change shape without a release.
Analysis
Taking over someone else's half-finished Android project is a specific kind of work. The first job is not features, it is getting the thing back into a state where it can ship at all, and then clearing what the client has already found wrong with it.
Templating the content was what made the rest survivable. The alternative is hard-coding each content type and shipping a new binary every time editorial wants a different layout.
Result
Taken from an unshippable state to deployment, serving sports data across a wide range of news topics for Singapore and Indonesia.
Photos
Regional news first. The point was Indonesia, not a US feed with a different flag on it. 