Mijn Magazines: polishing Roularta's digital newsstand
My internship via AE: helping perfect Roularta's rebuilt digital newsstand, with 30+ magazine brands in one app, shipped bi-weekly to 100k+ readers.
Mijn Magazines is Roularta Media Group's digital newsstand: one app for the digital editions, articles, videos, and podcasts of 30+ Belgian and Dutch magazine brands, including Knack, Trends, Libelle, and Flair, in Dutch and French, with family sharing for subscriptions.
I joined the project during my internship at AE, the Leuven-based consultancy. The mission was clear: only around 5% of Roularta's subscribers were purely digital, and the app needed to carry the publisher's digital strategy.
The rebuild
- The app was rebuilt while the old one stayed in production, the riskiest kind of migration, because subscribers expect things to simply keep working
- The backend was migrated to Microsoft Azure, with frontend and backend properly separated
- Bi-weekly release cycles in an agile team; the biggest stability issues were fixed within three months, and the full rebuild landed in under six
The results were significant. CIO Luc Neysens summarized them as "40 percent more with the same budget and efforts", with inactive subscribers returning and both session length and article consumption up.
My part
To be precise: I did not build this rebuild, as the AE team had already carried it. I came in during my internship to help perfect, tweak, and polish it: refinements and production fixes in the React Native app, landing after code review like everyone else's work, while presenting my own topics within the team.
The app has over 100,000 installs on Android alone. It was my first experience shipping for a large Belgian enterprise, and it taught me lessons that startup work could not, for exactly the opposite reasons.