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Content Recommendations for Mobile Apps

Serve personalized article and video recommendations inside your iOS or Android app through the Personyze SDK, in HTML or JSON.

Updated 7 hours ago 3 min read
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What This Does

Personalized article, guide, and video recommendations — the same engine that powers content recommendations on your website — delivered inside your native iOS or Android app.

A reader who has been browsing a topic on your site sees related content in the app, and vice versa: the profile is shared, so the recommendations follow the person across surfaces rather than starting from scratch on each.

This uses the same SDK as product recommendations for apps. If the SDK is already installed for products, no further integration work is needed — you just create a content recommendation instead of a product one.

Prerequisites

  • A content catalog in Personyze — your articles or videos, with at least a URL per item. See Uploading Feeds & Data Files.
  • The Personyze SDK installed in your app — setup steps in the Mobile App Integration Guide.
  • Content interaction tracking so Personyze learns what each user reads — both on the website and, via SDK events, in the app.

How to Set It Up

  1. Install and initialize the SDK if it isn’t already, and confirm events reach the Live Visits dashboard.
  2. Report screens and content views from the app, so in-app reading feeds the same profile as web browsing.
  3. Create the content recommendation in the Personyze dashboard — choose the algorithm (most popular, recently published, recommended for you, others who viewed this also viewed) and any filters. See Content Recommendation Algorithm Types.
  4. Choose the output format — HTML for a WebView, or JSON to render natively.
  5. Render it in the app at the placement you want.

HTML or JSON?

  • HTML (WebView) — the recommendation renders as designed in Personyze. Quickest to ship, and marketers can restyle it without an app release.
  • JSON — Personyze returns the picks as structured data and your app renders them with native components. More work up front, but the result matches your app’s look and scroll behavior exactly. The field-mapping approach is the same as Content Recommendations via JSON Feed.

A note on app releases. Anything hard-coded natively — layout, field names — is frozen until your next app-store release. Design the JSON mapping with a little slack (a spare field or two) so content changes don’t require shipping a new build.

Tracking Clicks

For the recommendations to improve, Personyze needs to know what was clicked. In a WebView this is handled for you; with JSON rendering you must report clicks yourself through the SDK, or the algorithm never learns from in-app engagement.

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