Offline Principles

Many of us design and build apps in air-conditioned offices in major cities, using the latest devices with perfect internet connections. We don’t often think about how apps should work without a strong internet connection.

It's no wonder so many apps feel clunky or broken with a flaky internet connection, or none at all...

We decided to question ourselves, and to start treating the offline state as a core part of the experience rather than an edge case. While not everything can happen offline, plenty of tasks like writing a blog post should still work regardless of your connection...

WordPress API Challenges

WordPress powers over 30% of all web sites, but not all websites using WordPress are the same. Since WordPress is open source software that anyone can download and install on their server, there are countless versions of WordPress running unique configurations.

This creates a unique challenge for the WordPress mobile apps: Instead of having a single server with a defined API that we control and manage, we need to support multiple APIs from different WordPress versions and we can never complete trust the data being given back to us...

WordPress Mobile Apps: the Heartbeat release process

A new great feature, an important bug fix, a UI improvement, a subtle but effective change; whenever the latest development is complete, the next step is to ship it to users.

As developers, we want to deliver improvements quickly, but we have to strike a balance. We like to release bug fixes as soon as possible, but we also want to avoid annoying users with too-frequent updates...