De Telegraaf
Building the digital backbone of the Netherlands’ biggest newsroom
Building the future of digital news
De Telegraaf is the Netherlands’ largest daily newspaper, and its app has become one of the country’s most-used media products.
Since 2011, Apadmi has worked alongside De Telegraaf’s in-house development team, evolving the app from a single iPad edition into a platform that has adapted to every stage of the publisher’s digital strategy.
The biggest shift wasn’t technical. As the business moved from an advertising-led model towards premium subscriptions, the app needed to convert readers into subscribers at scale without sacrificing the audience that made it valuable.
Built for a changing business
The original app launched on iPad before expanding to iPhone and Android as demand grew.
The biggest evolution came in 2021, when De Telegraaf rebuilt the app to merge two separate products—the live news service and the digital newspaper—into a single experience.
The rebuild also embedded Telegraaf Premium directly into the product, making subscriptions part of the reading journey rather than an added paywall. This has since become a meaningful contributor to the publisher’s digital revenue. New capabilities such as podcasts and ongoing feature releases have kept pace with changing reader habits.
Performance at newsroom speed
For a news app used by millions, performance is part of the product. Articles need to load almost instantly, while breaking news alerts must reach millions of devices within seconds.
Balancing that speed with the overhead of advertising technology has required continuous backend optimisation and performance improvements over many years.
One team, one roadmap
Throughout the partnership, Apadmi has worked as an extension of De Telegraaf’s in-house team rather than as an external supplier.
Shared stand-ups, continuous delivery and joint planning have enabled both teams to evolve the product together, with Apadmi leading development while contributing to product thinking and design.
Impact
The partnership has transformed the app from a publishing product into a key driver of audience growth and digital reach.
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15
year partnership with Apadmi
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5M+
monthly readers reached via the app
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60%
share of De Telegraaf’s total digital reach
From national newsroom to regional network
The app’s success led parent company Mediahuis to ask Apadmi to turn it into a white-label product. That same technical foundation now powers apps for a number of Mediahuis’ regional Dutch and Belgian titles, including Noordhollands Dagblad, De Gooi- en Eemlander, Gazet van Antwerpen, and Het Belang van Limburg.
What started as a single iPad edition is now the infrastructure running underneath an entire publishing group: one well-built codebase, reused instead of rebuilt, every time Mediahuis needed to launch the next title.
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