BBC Mundo iPhone app
Post categories: BBC World Service, mobile
| 15:11 UK time, Wednesday, 18 April 2012
The app offers two different default homepages
A month or so ago I blogged about the iPhone app for the BBC Russian service, and about how we hoped to roll out further apps very quickly; and today you can see the next step with the release of our iPhone app for our Latin American Spanish Service, BBC Mundo.
What have we been doing over the past month?
Well, much of this time was taken up with the App Store approvals process - it takes a couple of weeks for them to perform quality control checks on the code.
We have also tuned the app for the Latin American markets. So, as well as the international social networks you can share articles via the popular Spanish network Menéame. You can also make the latest news stream ('Ultimas noticias') your default homepage in preference to the headlines ('Principales noticias'). On the BBC Mundo website as in much of Latin America the simple stream of the latest news is one of the most popular sections, so if you prefer to see this first you can now do so by clicking on the configuration ('Configurar') icon.
Finally, our chief developer Adam managed to fall down the stairs and injure his ankle in this period. Thankfully he is now doing fine.
More about BBC Mundo
BBC Mundo (originally the BBC Latin American Service) is, like Russian, one of our oldest services. It started broadcasting radio in 1938 and its website started in 1998 under the title 'BBC Línea Directa' (BBC Direct Line).
BBC Direct Line in 1998. Sadly the telephone-on-wheels logo just got cropped out of this screengrab.
Both radio and internet services were rebranded BBC Mundo in 2000.
It stopped broadcasting radio in 2011 and has been a fully digital (i.e. internet only) service since then.
During these 74 years, BBC Mundo has seen vast changes in both politics and economics, of which the latest is a huge growth in smartphone and tablet take up in Latin America , (see some 2010 data on the growth of smartphones). Hopefully the users in this exciting market will like the offline browsing possibilities and app interface.
BBC Mundo in 2001
As always, I would like to thank the team for their excellent work on this - and I look forward to blogging about more apps and operating systems soon.
Phil Buckley is Executive Product Manager, BBC Future Media World Service
Comment number 1.
At 15:51 18th Apr 2012, JamesRogers wrote:Will this be the blue print how the new English language news app for the iPhone will look. The current one is different from the GEL, and - with your 4-10-1 strategy - I expect a change? So with News, Popular, Categories/Section and Configuration.
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Comment number 2.
At 15:58 18th Apr 2012, JamesRogers wrote:Can you tell us a little more about the multi media options in these apps. Will that be similar in the (possibly updated) English language iPhone News app?
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Comment number 3.
At 16:30 18th Apr 2012, Phil Buckley wrote:Hi James -
Ah, some excellent questions there.
The World Service apps are different from the UK news one yes, though this is at least partially because the World Service websites are set up slightly differently from the UK news ones.
The two website systems will certainly be moving together over the coming months but I'm afraid I just don't know at this stage when or how much the apps will be affected - the English language app remains very popular so we don't want to mess with it that much. Sorry to not be able to give you a more definite answer there.
For multimedia, yes, as with the UK app you are able to watch videos from within a story; but you also have the choice of the top 5 most watched videos (popular/ lo mas visto') or an index of the latest videos via the 'categorias' menu.
Best wishes and thanks for your interest -
Phil
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Comment number 4.
At 16:58 18th Apr 2012, Phil Buckley wrote:By the way, hispanophones might be interested in BBC Mundo's article on the app at https://bbc.kongjiang.org/www.bbc.co.uk/mundo/noticias/2012/04/120418_tecnologia_aplicacion_bbcmundo_aa.shtml -
P
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