Let's go that's awesome to hear! Let me know if I can help you with any questions or bugs during the process!

Everyone is different but from my experience protocol development topics have become easier after learning app development first. It's a great way to get your journey started with a lot of cool potential projects out there to build on Bitcoin/Lightning/Nostr.

I think a native stacker news app is a great idea! If you get stuck with understanding the existing fork you're starting with I would suggest building it from scratch yourself and starting with a basic API integration to just pull in all of the items and make it work read only at first. Not sure what languages you're familiar with but going the Javascript -> React -> React Native route is probably the easiest for making Native apps (in my opinion) but PWA's are awesome as well!