Senior Software Engineer at The Economist

The Economist

The flagship Android app of one of the world's most respected publications — live & on-demand streaming, podcasts and offline-first journalism for readers worldwide. This is the app I architect and build today.

01 My contributions

The Economist Group, a world-renowned media entity, is most celebrated for its premier publication — with origins tracing back to 1843. As Senior Software Engineer I architect the Android experience that brings its independent journalism to millions of readers. Some of my contributions:

• Architected and implemented seamless Live & VOD streaming for audio and video, built on Media3/ExoPlayer.
• Picture-in-Picture (PiP) — uninterrupted playback while you leave the app.
• Device-calendar integration — users save upcoming events locally to their calendar.
• Podcast playback with local downloads for offline listening.
• Offline-first experience — caching data so articles stay readable without connectivity.
• AdMob SDK integration — Banner and Native formats with audience targeting.
• MVI multi-module architecture with Mavericks across presentation, domain and data layers.
• Unit and instrumentation tests — JUnit4 and Jetpack Compose UI tests.
• Reusable Compose widgets, comprehensive theming and a robust design system.
• Custom swipe-to-delete animations to enhance UX.
• Code quality tooling — Detekt for static analysis, Dokka for generated documentation.

02 Insider — the award-winning bet

Insider was announced on 25 September 2025 and went live on 9 October 2025 — live and on-demand shows twice a week across Defence, Geopolitics, Economics and Tech. Eight months later it won the Professional Publishers Association's Video Content of the Year 2026.

The app is where Insider lives: Press Gazette reports that ~80% of Insider viewing happens in the app (20% on web), with 75% of subscribers engaged, 90% awareness, 94% "very satisfied" — and 120M social views feeding the funnel. The feature they called out publicly? The app's audio mode for video — background listening with the phone locked.

What I built into Insider:

• VOD chapters — seek-bar markers plus a chapter panel for YouTube-style scrubbing through long episodes.
• Resume (pick up where you left off) — Insider video continues exactly where the viewer stopped, across sessions.
• Featured Insider on Home — surfacing episodes on the homepage plus the dedicated hub.
• Gifting — subscribers can gift Insider episodes.
• Engagement surfaces — calendar, follow, sharing and sponsorship touchpoints across Insider.
• Play tier homepage — a new home bringing podcasts, Insider, shorts and games together.
• Unified audio/video player — Phase 1 in progress: seamless audio ↔ video switching, including background listening with the phone locked.

03 The app, rebuilt

Insider landed inside an app that was rebuilt from scratch for performance and stability — with the old Android app called out as the pain point the rebuild fixed. Highlights of the rebuilt experience I help ship:

• Resume everywhere — narrated articles and podcasts pick up where you left off across sessions, with Continue Listening on the Podcasts tab.
• Audio queue — build, edit and reorder a listening queue across the app's audio.
• Video, promoted — a dedicated video tab and video on Home, with distinct weekday and weekend home experiences.
• For You — followed topics, bookmarks and push control in a personalised feed.
• AI narration — synthetic narration fills the gap until human narration lands.
• Broad device support — targeting Android 12+ and tested back to Android 9.

04 Architecture

The app runs on an MVI, multi-module architecture: unidirectional data flow keeps complex screens predictable, module boundaries keep build times and ownership clean, and a reusable Compose design system means every new feature ships looking and behaving like The Economist.

• Kotlin
• Jetpack Compose
• Media3 / ExoPlayer
• MVI
• Multi-module
• AdMob