Lessons learned from designing, building, and launching an Android news app for Metro newspaper, covering development, marketing challenges, and user acquisition.

For the past four years I have been working in an editorial environment Metro, the third largest daily UK newspaper. Over this time I have been amazed at the number of times that serious change has been attempted and failed.

Metro 10 was born out of a desire to experiment with native mobile news reading experiences that solved a different problem to our already fully responsive website.

The majority of content placement on metro.co.uk is now managed by software. This has been a long journey based on real world feedback and incremental addition of complexity.

For the last two years I have been focused on the design, build and growth of Metro.co.uk utilising the WordPress VIP platform.

Metro10 is the first Android App that I have been involved in from concept to release in the Google Play store.

Responsive design was a key enabler of the strategy that enabled Metro to grow to 34m monthly uniques.

Over the past 12 months Metro has been on an amazing growth curve.

We have been working on automating large parts of the content ordering on Metro.co.uk since our responsive redesign in Dec '12.

About six months ago I was sitting in a CTO meeting across DMGT and they were trying to come up with ways that we could improve collaboration across the group.

I was very fortunate to attend the 2013 WordPress VIP Developer conference in Napa Valley this year.

Over the past few years error pages of the Internet have got a lot more interesting.

Metro's existing CMS "WPS" When I joined Metro they were using a custom CMS that used GWT for the admin screens which wrote to a CRX content repositor...

Over the past 12 months I have been working with an amazing team of people at Metro the largest free daily newspaper in the world to migrate their exi...