Hey there hunters!
My name is Pablo, I'm the CEO and Co-Founder of Worona. It is our very first time being featured in Product Hunt and we couldn't be happier :D
Our current technology (Worona 0.7) is a beta version able to turn WordPress sites into Mobile Apps, but we have bigger ambitions. The ultimate goal of Worona is to provide the best experience for WordPress sites on mobile devices. So more services like webapps, AMP or Facebook Instant Articles will be added to the current "WordPress to App" service.
We didn't expect to be featured here before releasing our 1.0, and we can't wait to launch it and show it to you. I invite you to read about our future plans in this post I wrote to our users: https://blog.worona.org/the-maki...
> We also want to give a 20% discount in all our products to this community, you can use the coupon: hunt20
I'm here to answer all your questions, so feel free to ask!
@poliukgv great stuff! Pablo, my first startup Appifier (founded 2011, raised 2012, acquired late 2013) was doing exactly this WordPress to App conversion. If you want any learnings, feel free to reach out to me - it'd be my pleasure.
Background: http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/11...
@poliukgv I would recommend improving the text on your website about Publishing. It says, "If you don’t want to deal with the process of compiling your app, or you don’t want to spend your time uploading your app to the Apple app store or Google Play , let us do the work for you!" But the main selling point is not the time spent to upload; it's the money spent to have a Developers account with Apple. You should mention that clearly. "If you don't want to deal with the process of compiling your app, or you don't have an Apple Developers membership (which costs 99 USD/year and is required to upload to the App Store), let us do the work for you!"
@ricricucit Hello Enrico, thanks for your feedback :)
The ultimate goal of Worona is to provide the best experience for WordPress sites on mobile devices. Apps are just the starting point to provide this delightful mobile experience. We saw that WordPress owners were asking for Apps so we provided them a free & Open Source solution.
You can read a bit more about our vision here: https://blog.worona.org/the-maki...
@poliukgv not sure wordpress-to-app is a service I'll ever be interested in.
...and I still think some use cases would help your marketing pages
to actually show the most common uses, based on real-world applications.
Also because after your answer, I still don't get the point :)
Anyway, just my 2 cents.
Good luck!
@ricricucit right now, our technology is only able to turn simple WordPress sites into Apps. Most of the apps created using worona are blogs and newspapers.
The Apps allow users to access content offline, and also to receive push notifications.
We really appreciate your suggestion, real examples are something we definitely have to add to our site.
@poliukgv@ricricucit yeah it would really help to have real examples of WordPress sites converting over. The problem I see that most large blogs now distribute content through social media and some smaller ones have moved to Medium or other platforms. I don't know when I think about installing an app of any of the blogs I consume I don't know if I really would. I already have too many apps. I see notifications powerful as an external trigger much better than Email. Especially since iOS doesn't support Web notifications yet but I wonder if you'll get users to install an app just for that. What else makes the experience better over the mobile web to users?
@kesslerio hey Martin, thanks for joinin the conversation!
We totally agree with you, blogs now distribute content using multiple channels. We consider this a great opportunity. Our goal is to provide WordPress administrators the best tool to adapt their sites for mobile consumption, and Apps are only one of the channels to cover. We have plans to add more services to our platform: AMP (for Google searches & Twitter), Facebook Instant Articles, Web-Apps (for people who won't install the App version of the site :wink: ). There is still a lot of work to do but we want WordPress Administrators to be one-click away from adapting their sites to all the mobile distribution channels.
Mobile Apps have features that make them more convenient than websites (specially sites with server side rendering). Offline content, Instant loading and push notifications are some of those features. HTML5 is bringing most of these features to mobile sites, and we are going to be able to provide the same "app-like" experience in webapps (you can read more here: https://blog.worona.org/the-maki...). We understand some people won't install apps, but others find them more useful than accessing and URL, in any case we will cover both channels.
Medium is becoming really big, and lot of people is leaving their personal WordPress blogs. At the same time WordPress is growing and now powers 26% of the sites, so we still consider WordPress a great market to cover.
Wordpress should back you and make it an optional default theme. Publishing a fully working wordpress website on devices might be flawless and natural, show them the way. Thanks.
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