The first ever BMWBLOG News app for Android devices is now live in the Google Play Store. For over 10 years, iPhone owners have enjoyed our native mobile app, but the requests for an Android BMWBLOG app have intensified in the last couple of years. Therefore, we decided to rebuild both apps from ground up and launch them at the same time. Today, the new iOS BMWBLOG News app can also be found in the Apple Store and you can download it here.

Let’s start with the non-geeky features. Both apps were built with simplicity and minimalism in mind. We believe that the news should be easy to read and fast. So there were no major changes from our previous user interface and user experience. But we did add a few cool features.

  • A custom notification system which gives you the opportunity to tailor your reading experience. You can now select which notifications to receive based on the topic you’re interested in. If you press the “Notify Me” button in an article, you will receive notifications only related to that topic. Like a BMW M4, for example.
  • The “For You” tab will save all your favorite topics so you can access them at anytime
  • Dark mode is here
  • Super fast searching capabilities so you can quickly find answers to your questions

We also redesigned the app to fit a variety of tablets which is always a tricky thing to achieve, but quite rewarding. There is also a slightly different UI on iPads and Android tablets to fully take advantage of the enhanced real estate screen.

Now onto the geeky stuff. Both apps have the same base code which allows us to update them at the same time, or fix any bugs without the need to maintain two code repositories. It reduces our workload, complexities and costs, of course. We can also make changes server side without having to compile the code, upload the app to the Google Play or App Store and wait for a week to be approved.

Lastly, but not least important, they are quite lightweight, especially on Android (9.5MB), so they won’t take a lot of your precious storage space.

We hope you enjoy these new apps and of course, if you have any feedback, suggestions or bugs to report, please let us know in the comments below or by email at apps@bmwblog.com. Also a special shoutout to our rockstar developer Luca Corsini (LinkedIn)