Business site owners and bloggers can’t afford to ignore mobile. As PC sales stall and tablets and smartphones become ubiquitous, the revenue being generated from mobile interactions is skyrocketing. WordPress theme developers have been on the case for quite a while, with many responsive and mobile-first themes available that look good on devices of any size. But, even with responsive design, sites are missing out on many of the features that make mobile so powerful.
Is WordPress A Good For Mobile Apps
Without the ability to tie into a phone’s hardware, place icons or widgets on the device’s home screen, and access notification mechanisms, there are limits to what a site can do. To properly leverage the advantages of mobile, site owners should be thinking about mobile apps. But, mobile app development is expensive. Many businesses can’t afford to invest in the creation of a high-quality mobile application built from scratch by an experienced developer.
There have been plugins that can create an app “wrapper” for WordPress sites for some time. They solve half the problem: a web view of the site allows site owners to launch an app without having to invest in development, but this approach is seriously limited and usually doesn’t offer an experience for users that improves significantly on a visit to the site in a web browser.
AppPresser is a new breed of premium plugin that seeks to ease the process of making a WordPress site truly mobile without having to start from scratch. AppPresser is capable of taking a WordPress site and wrapping it in a native app, just like many previous plugins, but where it differs is that it makes available — for a price – extensions that allow the site to communicate with the phone’s hardware. For example, with the AppGeo extension, site owners can use a phone’s native geolocation tools, or with AppCamera, users can take and upload images to the site using a device’s camera.
Once the plugin has been properly integrated with the site, the app can be packaged ready for submission to the iOS app store or the Android Play Store. It’s a nifty plugin and out of the box it offers a range of useful features, but to get the maximum benefit it’s helpful to have at least some development experience. To make the most of AppPresser, you’ll need knowledge of JavaScript, which will allow you to use the Phonegap API that comes along with the plugin, writing your own custom integrations with the device hardware.
AppPresser is a clever solution for businesses and site owners who want to go mobile but don’t want to implement an expensive parallel development effort for a mobile application.
