The problem
News coverage is good at telling us what happened. It is often less useful at answering the next question: what could this mean for my job, my city, or my finances?
I built Ripple to explore that gap. It connects each story to the details a person chooses to share about their life, making distant news feel more concrete.
About
Most news apps give you a feed of headlines. Ripple gives you a briefing. Tell it where you live, what you do, and what you care about. It pulls from 11 sources, summarizes the day, and shows how each story may connect to your life.
I built and shipped the product solo. The iOS app uses SwiftUI, with an n8n pipeline, Supabase backend, and the ChatGPT API for summarization and personalization. I also built the onboarding, paywall, and streaming response experience.
The core idea
The Ripple Effect
During onboarding, Ripple asks about your life instead of your interests: your work, your town, whether you rent or own, who's in your house. It never mentions AI. That profile is the foundation of the product.
When a story breaks, the pipeline pulls it in (11 sources through n8n and Supabase), removes as much publisher framing as possible, and uses OpenAI to answer one question: how could this story reach this person's life? Tap “See the Ripple” and that's what you get. It is a personal impact analysis rather than another summary.
A mortgage-rate story reads differently for a renter than for a homeowner with two kids. That difference became Ripple's product premise.
“This app is so legit. I want to consume all my content in this form. ‘See the Ripple’ is so fresh, and an amazing use of my info and location.”
Screens
How it works
Build your profile
Share the parts of your life that affect how you read the news, including your location, job, interests, and finances.
Read your briefing
Ripple turns reporting from 11 sources into one plain-language briefing.
See the Ripple
Tap any story for an analysis of how it could affect your own life.
How it's built
Impartial outlets, pulled every 4 hours.
Strips source bias and reporter framing.
Summarizes and personalizes per profile.
Stores briefings and user profiles.
Streams your briefing and ripples.
Key decisions
Reduce publisher framing before summarization
I chose 11 sources for their relative impartiality, then built an n8n workflow that removes as much of each source's and reporter's framing as possible before summarization. This separates the factual briefing from the personal analysis.
Charge from day one
Every briefing has an API cost, so Ripple launched with a paid model: $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. That limits the number of users willing to try it, but each subscriber covers the cost of their own use.
Cut the feature I spent two months building
I spent close to two months getting a water ripple animation to spread from the See the Ripple button. Once it worked, the tradeoff was obvious: it made people wait when they wanted to read. I cut it. The time already invested was not a good reason to keep it.
Run the pipeline 6 times a day, not 48
The workflow originally ran every 30 minutes. Ripple is built for understanding the news, not being first with an alert, so I moved the cadence to hourly and then every four hours. Costs dropped, and no user complained about the change.
What went wrong
The personalized output was the hardest interaction to get right. Generating a full breakdown took 10 to 15 seconds, and early versions made users stare at a blank screen the whole time. I rebuilt it to stream. The text now renders as it arrives from the backend and is formatted along the way, so people can start reading within a couple of seconds.
Shipping took longer than anything I've built since. Ripple was my first app idea, started in July 2025, and it didn't reach the App Store until February 2026. It was hard enough that I shipped two other apps and put a couple more into TestFlight in the middle of building it.
Distribution has been harder than building the product. Ripple is competing for attention with CNN, Fox, and Ground News, and I have not yet found a reliable way to reach the right users.
Results
- 159 downloads
- since the February 2026 launch.
- 3 paying subscribers
- and 13 active users in the last 28 days. Each subscriber covers the cost of their own use.
- 48 → 6 pipeline runs/day
- an 8x reduction with no user complaints about the slower update cadence.
- 7 months
- from the first idea to the App Store. I shipped two other apps during that period.
With more resources
The next question is distribution. With a larger budget, I would test paid acquisition on Google and Meta rather than rely on App Store search alone.
I would also overhaul the interface for people who do not already follow the news closely. The idea still feels worth pursuing; the next step is learning whether a simpler experience helps more people see its value.
Get it
Ripple is free to download on the App Store. Briefings are a subscription: $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year.