How to Add Stories to Mobile Apps

There are two ways to add stories to a mobile app: build the feature yourself or integrate a stories SDK. Building gives you full control, but your team also has to build and maintain the editor, targeting and analytics. An SDK needs a one-time integration by your developers. After that, marketing and product teams create and publish stories from a web console, without app releases.

This guide compares the options, walks through the SDK setup step by step, gives a checklist for choosing a provider, and shows what teams use stories for.

Why In-App Stories Work for User Engagement

Users already know the format from Instagram, TikTok, Spotify and YouTube, and it is becoming standard inside apps of every kind, from food delivery to fintech. Stories are fast to consume and easy to interact with, which matters for short attention spans.

For product and marketing teams, stories solve three common problems:

• Static banners don't get tapped.
• Tooltips often feel like clutter.
• In-app modals get dismissed without being read.

Stories guide users instead of blocking them. When connected to user data, they can be personal and contextual. Apps use them for feature launches, seasonal campaigns, in-app tutorials, reward announcements, feedback collection and A/B tests of interactive formats.

Three Ways to Add Stories to an App

Before you start, decide who will create the stories and how often. That usually decides the approach.

• Build in-house. You build the story viewer, a content backend, an editor, targeting, analytics and support for every new format. New stories usually need developers and often an app release. This fits apps where stories are a core social feature and there is a team to maintain it.
• Use an open-source UI component. The viewer comes ready (progress bar, tap and swipe), but you still build the backend, content management, targeting and analytics. This fits a few static stories that rarely change.
• Integrate a stories SDK platform. You only do the integration. The SDK renders stories natively, and a web console handles content, targeting and analytics, so marketing and product teams publish without releases. This fits teams that run campaigns, onboarding and announcements every week.

If you want to feature content from your users, you don't need a full user-generated stories feature. Collect submissions through polls and open questions inside stories, or from your brand's social media, and publish the best ones as stories in your app.

How to Add Stories to Your App Using InAppStory

With InAppStory, in-app stories are added through an SDK. Once it is integrated, stories appear as native components inside your app, and your team controls placement, design and logic from a no-code console.

Step 1. Integrate the SDK

Native SDKs are available for iOS and Android, plus React Native and Flutter. For web, there are JavaScript and React SDKs. Your developers add the SDK and place a story feed on the screens you choose: home, profile, catalog, order confirmation and so on. You can create several feeds for different screens.

The setup is a one-time task, and our engineers guide your team through it. Step-by-step instructions for each platform are in the SDK guides, and our article on how to integrate an SDK explains the process for non-developers.

Step 2. Create Stories in the Console

After the integration, marketing or content teams take over. In the InAppStory console they can:

• create and edit stories in a visual editor, from scratch or from templates;
• add text, video, buttons, polls, quizzes, timers and product cards;
• schedule stories or launch them from triggers, such as an in-app event or a push notification.

No design tools or developers are needed after setup.

Step 3. Target, Personalize and Test

• Show stories to user segments using tags and your own data.
• Personalize text with dynamic fields, such as the user's name or account data.
• Run up to five versions of a story to see which performs best.

Step 4. Measure and Iterate

Track impressions, opens, completions and clicks, and compare results by story, date or platform. Keep the formats that work and update the ones that don't, without touching the app code.

How to Choose a Stories SDK

Most stories SDKs cover the basic viewer. The differences show up in what your team can do after the integration. Questions to ask any provider:

• Platforms. Does it support all your apps: native iOS and Android, React Native or Flutter, and the web?
• Editor. Can non-developers build and publish stories, and are there templates?
• Interactivity. Which widgets are included: polls, quizzes, product cards, timers? InAppStory has 21 interactive widgets.
• Targeting and personalization. Can you use your own segments and fill stories with user data?
• Testing and analytics. Are A/B tests and story-level analytics built in?
• Other formats. Will you need in-app messages, banners or games later? InAppStory covers 8 in-app formats and 12+ ready-made game mechanics, so you don't add a second SDK.
• Security and deployment. Check for SSO, two-factor authentication and, if your company requires it, on-premise deployment.
• Help with content. Some teams need creative production support or an onboarding strategy, not only software.

If you are comparing providers, see our side-by-side Storyly vs InAppStory comparison.

What You Can Do with In-App Stories

We have created and analyzed more than 30,000 in-app stories. These are the use cases teams come back to most often.

1. Onboarding and Feature Education

Stories walk new users through key actions step by step: setting up a profile, explaining the first screen, introducing features with short videos or image sequences. Show them only in the first session or on app open, and create different onboarding flows for different user groups.

2. Campaigns, Offers and Announcements

Use stories for promotions, flash sales, seasonal campaigns, feature announcements and countdowns.

Each story can include a CTA button, a timer or a product widget, and you can trigger a story when a user completes an action such as a purchase or an app update.

3. Collecting Feedback

Polls, quizzes, satisfaction sliders, open questions, voting and star ratings with follow-up logic let you ask for feedback on a feature or segment users by preference, all inside stories.

4. Personalization

Dynamic fields let you greet users by name or tailor messages with data your app already has. The story then feels like part of the product rather than a generic campaign. More in our guide to personalization.

5. Personalized Recaps in the Style of Spotify Wrapped

Year-end recaps show each user their own results: orders, trips, savings, workouts or rewards. You don't need to build a separate feature for this. Create one story template, fill it with each user's data through dynamic fields, and schedule it for the end of the year. Plan the data and the design a few weeks ahead, since December is when users expect recaps.

What Else You Can Manage from the Console

• Scheduling: start and end times for each story.
• Story feeds: separate feeds for different screens.
• Story position: pin stories to the top or reorder them.
• Audience targeting: show stories only to specific users.
• Analytics: impressions, completions, clicks and engagement by platform, date or story.
• A/B testing: up to five versions of a story.
• Security: two-factor authentication, session and access management.

To see how other teams use stories, browse our case studies.

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