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...
@gozmike Hello Mike! That would be great. Here you have my email pablo(@)worona.org ping me so we can talk :D
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@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!"
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Congrats for your product, definitively I will spend some time with this.
Surprisingly not many solutions like this in the market.
The biggest problem for me is that extensions maintenance should be granted forever. I guess these extensions are not Open Source, isn't it?
@jesusramirezs Hi Jesus. I am the CTO. I am really glad you like Worona :)
The next version (Worona 1.0) will have both free and premium themes/extensions. And we will open the platform to 3rd party developers and designers who will be able to upload both free or paid themes/extensions as well. Their choice.
We believe in Open Source software. It is changing the world and we want to be part of it so Worona itself will remain always open sourced.
But we also believe that not everything has to be free or open sourced so we want to allow both worlds in our themes/extensions marketplace.
Sometimes open source projects are maintained and incredible powerful but sometimes they are not. And still, there's people willing to pay for a solution and people willing to get paid to maintain a project. Both approaches are already working together in WP itself and other related communities like WooCommerce with excellent results. We want to embrace that diversity from Worona's core.
Besides that, Worona 1.0 will include other "mobile-related" services. We are going to start with "Native apps" (to upload to the AppStore and Google Play) and "Web apps" (same UX than Native apps, but loaded from the mobile browser). Then, we will add more services: Google AMP and Facebook Instant Articles. Maybe more in the future if other channels appear.
Worona's vision is to help WP owners reach mobile users with an appropriate user experience, not matter if that's with an installed app, in a mobile browser, a Google search (AMP) or inside Facebook (Instant Articles).
But I understand your concern about extensions maintenance. So right here, right now, I give my word that if we ever have to close the company, we will open source any theme/extension which is not open sourced yet.
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@luisherranz Thank you for your detailed reply.
I didn't raise my question right. I should have used the words "source available" instead of "Open Source". I fully agree with you, not everything have to be free or Open Souce, example: WordPress premium themes in fact. I did not intent to detract from the product.
Do you plan to add social features? for example, an extension that allows readers to publish their own contents, comments, moderation... I see here lots of possibilities!
@jesusramirezs Yes, I'd love to host all our code in our public Github account, even the premium extensions. I've seen some paid WP plugins doing so and it has its advantages. For example, I've done pull requests to one of them, even that I am a paying customer, so I see the benefits. Besides, they can serve as examples of how to make Worona's extensions, which is nice as well.
Regarding the social features you ask, we haven't thought on those particular features, but we would love to see them in Worona :)
That's one of the beauties of open source, there are not limits. You can extend them to add exactly what you need. We are putting a lot of care in the Worona 1.0 development experience because we want extending Worona to be a delightful experience, way easier than it is extending WordPress today.
But until we get to that point, there's still a lot of work to do ;)
Hey Pablo, cool idea. However my wordpress admin page is not working after I installed the plugin. I have to go to my hosting site to disable the plugin to get it work. Any idea?
@xxxxxxiao What our Worona plugin does right now is barely more than activating the official WP-API plugin in the background: http://wp-api.org/
Probably your WP site has something which doesn't play nice with the WP-API. Anyway, if you can see the error (both in php log or in enabling debug mode) and you can send us an email to support@worona.org we will help you out.
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Hi! Congrats! The product looks great.
Any comparison with Apppresser? How I do build the app? Using phonegap like Apppresser?
@yu_cheng_wang Hello Yu-Cheng!
Apppresser is a good solution for turning a WordPress into an App, but they don't have a free version and their code is not open source.
You can create your app following our developers guide: www.worona.org/start . Right now, Worona uses Coronasdk to create the App. We have plans of moving to phonegap with Worona 1.0.
If you have any other doubts, just let us know!
p.d. you can also contact us by mail: support@worona.org we give premium support to everybody, including free users :)
@jesusramirezs@poliukgv@worona I find the new version of Apppresser has offline mode, but I am not sure if there are any differences.
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This looks promising! I'm wondering about the extensions, are there any plans to add comments and member features to the extensions and allowing for in-app interactions?
@janet_alexandersson Hello Janet! Thanks for your interest. We are working in a new version of the technology, it will be released in a few months.
Comments will be released by then.
What do you mean by "member features allowing in-app interactions" ? Only comments, or you were thinking in something else? :)
Pd. You can read a bit more about our plans here: https://blog.worona.org/the-maki...
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I really love that it's possible to make an app out of your Wordpress blog! Isn't this similar to DWNLD ? What makes you better?
@filip_johansen thanks man! I'm glad you love the idea :)
DWNLD is great, but it is a general-purpose, closed-source app generator. What that means is:
- It's not focused only WordPress so don't expect a tight integration. It looks like they don't ask to install any plugin, so I bet they are using RSS instead of the WP-API, which has many limitations.
- It's not extensible or open sourced, so you can't add features or functionality. You depend on the features and themes they develop. With Worona 1.0, you can use the available extensions and themes or create new ones with your requirements.
Regarding the pricing, they use a software-as-a-service model, with monthly payments. If you stop paying, they remove your app. With Worona, you can upload your app by your own and we won't charge you a penny. And if you want us to upload it for you, we charge a one-time payment for the service.
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Given that app installs are down year over year, 25% in the iOS app store, and that uninstall rates are up by 13%, how will you convince users that this is better than a mobile optimized website?
@andreasduess Hey Andreas, that's a really good question. I've sorta answered in a previous comment (https://www.producthunt.com/tech...).
The ultimate goal of Worona is to provide the best experience for WordPress sites on mobile devices. And that goes beyond Mobile Apps. Actually, we don't want to convince people that mobile apps are better than mobile optimized sites. We are working on both things, so the WordPress administrator doesn't have to choose. You can read more about this here: https://blog.worona.org/the-maki...
Right now WordPress administrators are demanding mobile Apps, and if it comes the day when Apps are not demanded anymore, we will be still there providing tools to make WordPress sites work great on mobile.
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@poliukgv Thanks Pablo - apologies for not reading up on previous comments.
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