ApfelBlatt 3.2

Overview

ApfelBlatt was a German web magazine about Apple products and services. I designed and developed the magazine's official iOS app from scratch as a freelance project, with separate layouts for iPhone and iPad. The work ran in parallel with a full redesign of the magazine's website, which my app design had to align with.

The Brief

The existing ApfelBlatt app needed to be rebuilt. The goals were to simplify the reading experience, bring the app visually in line with the new website, and do all of this without adding any new work for the editorial team. The last constraint shaped a lot of the technical decisions: the team published everything through WordPress, and that workflow wasn't going to change.

Design and Development

I worked with the client in an ongoing back-and-forth: requirements, design concepts, refinement based on their feedback and reader responses, then implementation. The smartphone and tablet layouts were designed separately rather than just scaled versions of each other, because reading a magazine on a 9-inch iPad and on a 4-inch iPhone are genuinely different experiences.

The technical core was a custom WordPress plugin and a matching API specification I wrote to connect it to the app. When a new article is published in WordPress, the plugin pushes it to the app automatically. No manual export, no extra step: the editorial workflow stayed exactly as it was.

Offline reading was a priority, given that magazine reading often happens in transit or in areas with unreliable connectivity. Articles are downloaded in the background when a connection is available, without any user action required. To prevent the app from quietly consuming all available storage over time, a threshold-based cleanup mechanism deletes older articles that have already been read.

Outcome

The app launched successfully and was well-received by readers. The zero-friction editorial integration was the piece the client cared most about: the team could keep publishing exactly as before, and the app took care of the rest.

The app was discontinued in 2015 due to time constraints.