A Marathi news portal in Pune wants readers to get its stories without the browser; a football fan in Cairo wants one feed for Al Ahly, Zamalek and the Premier League with nothing else; a village cooperative in Kano wants agricultural prices and local headlines in Hausa on one screen. The big news apps cover everyone and satisfy no one, and the "news app templates" you can buy come with someone else's design and a feed setup that breaks the first time a source changes its format.
Describing the app to App Builder Agent gives you a reader built around your sources and your categories. You name the RSS feeds or the news API, say how the categories should be arranged, what bookmarks and offline reading should do, and the AI agent writes a real React Native app you can test in a live phone preview. This guide walks through what a news app needs, a prompt that produces a clean first version, and the details (duplicate stories, broken images, time zones) that separate a hobby build from something readers keep.
What a news app must handle
- Sources — RSS feeds or a news API, each with a name, logo and language, and a way to add or remove them later.
- Categories — Top, Local, Sports, Business, Tech, mapped from source sections or keywords, shown as tabs.
- Article list and reader — headline, source, time ago, thumbnail; a clean reader view with an Open original link.
- Bookmarks — saved with the full text so they open offline, grouped by date or tag.
- Offline reading — the last 30 articles per category cached on the device with a visible "cached" state.
- Refresh and de-duplication — pull to refresh, background refresh interval, and the same story from two feeds shown once.
- Dark mode — follows the phone setting with a manual override, plus font size for the reader.
- Search and share — search across loaded articles, share via the phone's share sheet.
Build it with App Builder Agent, step by step
List your sources as actual URLs; the agent can then test the parsing while it builds instead of guessing feed formats.
- Create a mobile app project. A reader app has no shared data unless you publish your own stories, so on-device storage is the right default and there is nothing to run.
- Describe sources, categories, bookmarks and offline behaviour. This prompt gives a solid start for a local news reader:Build a news app called "Pune Pulse" for readers in Pune. Sources (RSS): the Marathi and English feeds of two local papers plus a national feed for Top stories; I will paste the URLs. Categories as top tabs: Top, Pune, Maharashtra, Sports, Business, Entertainment; map feed sections to these and put unmapped items under Top. List shows headline, source logo, time ago in IST and thumbnail; tap opens a reader view with the article text, images and an Open original button. Bookmark any article with full text saved for offline. Cache the latest 30 articles per category on the device and show an "offline, showing saved stories" banner when there is no connection. Pull to refresh, refresh every 30 minutes, remove duplicate stories by matching titles. Dark mode following the phone with a manual toggle, reader font size small/medium/large, Marathi and English UI. Saffron and charcoal design.
- Paste the feed URLs and check every category. In the preview, open each tab and confirm stories land in the right place and images load. Use the Simulate panel to turn the network off and confirm bookmarks and cached stories still open.
- Add notifications, search and the "my sources" screen. This is what turns a reader into a daily habit:Add a Sources screen where readers can turn each feed on or off and add their own RSS URL. Add search across loaded and bookmarked articles. Send a "Morning briefing" notification at 7 am with the top three headlines from Pune, and a breaking-news notification when a story has "breaking" in its title. Let readers tag bookmarks and filter by tag.
- Install and share. Download the release-signed test APK from the Preview tab and send it to a few readers; watch which categories they open and reorder the tabs accordingly.
Prompts that work well
Narrow the sources and the app gets better, not worse. A few variants for other audiences:
Common mistakes (and the fix)
- Vague sources. "Indian news" gives the agent nothing to parse. Fix: paste real feed URLs or name the API and add the key to the .env file.
- Duplicates across feeds. The same agency story appears four times. Fix: ask for de-duplication by normalised title and link, and to keep the earliest copy.
- Broken or missing thumbnails. Feeds without images leave grey boxes. Fix: ask the agent to fall back to the first image in the article body, then to the source logo.
- Wrong "time ago". A story shows "in 5 hours" because the feed is in UTC. Fix: name your time zone in the prompt and ask that all times are converted before display.
- Reader view that strips too much. Tables, embedded tweets and captions vanish. Fix: keep an Open original button on every article and ask for a "view in browser" fallback when the extracted text is under 200 words.
- Caching everything forever. The app grows to hundreds of megabytes. Fix: state the cache limit per category and ask for a Clear cache button in Settings.
Make it feel finished
- A "new stories" pill at the top of the list after a refresh instead of the list jumping under the reader's thumb.
- Reader progress remembered per article, and a read/unread state in the list.
- Font and theme settings reachable from the reader screen, not buried in Settings.
- Category order the reader can drag to rearrange, with the last-used tab remembered.
- A source badge and time on every card so trust is visible at a glance.
Installing, publishing and next steps
When every tab fills correctly in the preview and bookmarks survive a network-off test, download the release-signed test APK from the Preview tab and read on it for a few days; the refresh interval and the cache size are things you only feel in daily use. For a public release, the AI app builder produces a signed APK and AAB with your own package id and version for the Play Store, with the keystore kept in the project for every later update.
Look through the ready-made news apps for layouts and category ideas before you start. If your readers also want a weather strip at the top of the Local tab, building a weather app without coding shows how the forecast part works; and if you want the same content on a website with a shareable link, building a business website without coding covers publishing to appbuilderagent.com in one click. Open the builder, paste your feed URLs, and you will have your first tab of stories within minutes.
Frequently asked
Where do the articles come from?
From sources you name: RSS feeds from newspapers and blogs, or a news API you have a key for. The AI agent writes the code that fetches, parses and groups them into your categories. Put API keys in the project's .env file and the agent reads them from there.
Can readers save articles and read them offline?
Yes. Bookmarks and the latest articles per category are stored on the device with the article text and thumbnail, so bookmarked and recently opened stories open without a connection. An offline banner shows when the app is showing cached content.
Does it need a hosted backend?
Not for a reader app: feeds are fetched by the phone and bookmarks stay on the device. If you publish your own articles or want an editor to post stories, ask for a hosted backend and the agent adds an admin screen and a live API; the backend is included.
Is building it free?
Signing in and building the first app is free, with a live phone preview in the browser. Editing further with the agent, unlimited APK builds, signed store builds and source export are paid; a one-time $1 membership unlocks test APKs and export. No subscriptions.
Can I put it on the Play Store?
Yes. The builder makes a signed APK and AAB with your own package id and version, and keeps the keystore with the project. For testing, download a release-signed APK from the Preview tab and install it directly. There are no iOS builds.
Build it now — free to start
Type the idea, sign in, and the agent builds it in your browser. Change anything by describing it.
Open the builder ›