News reading apps are the quiet ninjas of the mobile world. On the face of it, they perform a simple, repetitive task: displaying the daily news. Whether it's the Huffington Post, the BBC, The Guardian or the Mail Online, they all go about this task in very similar ways.

Behind the scenes, however, the popularity of the leading news outlets is so great, and there’s so much pressure to engage and retain habitual readers (who are fussy and spoilt for choice), that news reading apps have become the focus of huge amounts of technical skill and resources, both in terms of software development and QA. The apps may be simple, but perfecting them isn’t.

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• GameBench Staff
• 06. May 2016

• ios, UX, testing, Mail Online, BBC News, Huffington Post, android, frame rate, fps, responsiveness, gamebench, Guardian

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The notion of frame rate, or frames per second (fps), which measures the smoothness of an animation, is traditionally associated with game development rather than app development. This is because games depend on stutter-free graphics in order to feel immersive, believable and responsive to a gamer’s touch inputs.

However, as businesses increasingly rely on visual fluidity to sell their products and transmit the quality of their brands, this distinction between the two sides of our industry is becoming obsolete.

Streaming video, displaying moving ads, scrolling through media-rich pages, swiping across screens, zooming and dragging -- at a fundamental level these are all animations that feel wrong if they’re not smooth. And frame rate is pretty much the the only objective way to measure this smoothness as a user perceives it on their screen.

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• Sharif
• 09. March 2016

• ios, UX, retail, development, android, frame rate, fps, QA, apps

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