Business Insider's app has a dense information architecture — articles, markets, video, newsletters — all competing for attention. I prototyped a SwiftUI version to explore how native iOS capabilities could improve the reading experience.
Web-based news apps have a ceiling — scroll performance, gesture handling, and system integration all hit limits. SwiftUI gives you native scroll physics, haptics, and system-level features like Dynamic Type and VoiceOver for free. The question was: what does a news app feel like when it's truly native?
Article feed — a LazyVStack with custom card components. Each card has a parallax image header that responds to scroll position, and text that scales dynamically with the user's accessibility settings. No manual calculations — SwiftUI handles the layout.
Reading view — the article transition uses matchedGeometryEffect to smoothly expand the card into a full reading view. The image grows to full-width, the headline repositions, and the body text fades in. One fluid motion instead of a push navigation.
Pull interactions — pull down to refresh with haptic feedback, pull from the left edge to go back with a preview of the previous screen. These are native behaviors but customized with SwiftUI's gesture system.
Native frameworks change what you design. When scroll performance is guaranteed and gestures feel right automatically, you spend less time fighting the platform and more time on the actual experience.
SwiftUI — layout, navigation, gestures, accessibility Xcode — Instruments for scroll performance profiling