New NPHS App available on Android
Hours of scrolling through the same blue and white social media feeds can become dull. Now, students can turn to the black and gold of the “Newbury Park High” app for a brand new experience that connects them to other students on campus.
The App Club created and released the first version of the app in Jan. 2015. “Newbury Park High” had features that allowed students to receive updates from the clubs they were a part of, as well as interact with other students by sending in anonymous “Beeps” which were posted to a feed for all students to view.
“Newbury Park High” was originally available only on the Apple app store. Members of the App Club found that not many clubs were able to use their app because it was limited to Apple devices. With the new version, the club has made the app available to Android phones.
“Creating an Android version just opened it up to a larger audience,” said Kevin Norgaard, senior, and co president of the App Club.
Now, clubs can connect with all members who have Apple or Android phones. Along with this expansion, the App Club has also designed a new feature that allows clubs to add email addresses of members who don’t have Apple or Android phones. These members are still able to receive the updates that are normally shown in the Club Feed page of the app.
“We haven’t really seen an increase or decrease in the usage of the clubs this year because the year just started but we expect that to go up,” said Harsh Karia, senior and co-president of the App Club.
“When we started working on the app we just tried to find out what students really needed, and initially, it was a (form of) club communication,” said Matthew Mangawang, senior and Director of Finance and User Interface.
However, after seeing the popularity of the social feature, “Beeps”, the club worked to make it a better experience for students.
“I think [Beeps] will help expose people to the clubs involved,” Mangawang said.
Before the update, all Beeps that students sent were posted to a single page. Now, instead of having all the Beeps showing up in one feed, they are sorted into multiple topics, from things such as the upcoming presidential election, to incoming freshman advice.
Norgaard explained that with this new layout, “there can be multiple conversations going on.” Students can see what their peers have to say about a specific topic, and the most popular topics show up at the top of your feed.
To add to the Beep experience, each student now has a ‘dog tag’, which is a series of letters that serves as a username. Students can now anonymously communicate with each other by tagging another user in a Beep.
“We’re always adding stuff and removing [features] based on what people like,” Karia said. The App Club plans to continue improving and making changes to the app, and is working on merging the versions for Apple and Android to make them as similar as possible.
Photo copyright of Newbury Park High School App.
