Role
Operational Team Leader
Figli & Genitori
Mobile development tech lead
Official app of Figli & Genitori, parenting section of Corriere della Sera. In addition to presenting news from the parenting section of Corriere.it, it brings a series of innovative features including For You, for customizing content and receiving notifications on your favorite topics. The app presents also AI based features, the Virtual Assistant, first seen on the L'Economia app. The app also allows reading eBooks via a native PDF reader.
Project highlights
Team and results
Team size
3 people
App Store rating
5.0 (August 2025)
Play Store rating
4.6 (August 2025)
Technologies
Languages and frameworks
Native development
Swift, Kotlin
Layout
UIKit, Android XML Layout
In-app Purchase
StoreKit, Play Billing Library
Analytics
Adobe Experience Platform, Nielsen, AppsFlyer, Crashlytics
Push Notifications
Firebase Cloud Messaging, BlueShift
Cloud
Firebase, Google Cloud Platform
Code versioning
Git, Standard Git Flow
CI\CD
Fastlane, Jenkins
Project management
Jira, Confluence, OmniPlan
Screenshots
App preview
Download the app
Try it on your device
Problems and solutions
The challenges we faced
Time to market and feature parity with the website
The app needed to have the shortest possible time to market to ensure feature parity with the website. To achieve this, the app's content is presented in custom WebViews, where the pages activate a communication bridge with the app via WKScriptMessageHandler and JavascriptInterface. Non-invasive changes to the content structure don't require an app build until changes to the communication bridge are needed.
Optimizing maintenance and development of evolutiva
The Figli & Genitori app would have been part of the Verticali apps group, along with Economy and Salute. To minimize maintenance and development time and costs, as well as those for developing new Vertical apps, L'Economia was designed according to a target/flavor architecture, keeping the functionality in a shared code base, with app-specific modules for styles and configurations. This allowed us to develop the Figli & Genitori app in less time and with a smaller team.
Content Personalization
One of the goals was to offer users advanced content customization features within the app. A series of backend services were developed to enable the creation of the For You section, where users can choose to follow specific topics and journalists and activate related notifications to increase reader engagement.
AI Features
The desire to offer something truly innovative resulted in the development of the Virtual Assistant, a section of the app that implements artificial intelligence features. Users can submit questions to the Virtual Assistant, which will respond using Corriere della Sera articles as a knowledge base and will in turn suggest additional articles for further exploration of the topic.