Howdy! Welcome to the Automattic Mobile Tech Blog! On this blog we’ll be sharing our experiences as we develop mobile apps, including cool things we’ve built, challenges we’ve overcome, and the rationale behind our solutions.
If you’re not familiar with Automattic, we’re the company behind WordPress.com, the Jetpack plugin for WordPress, WooCommerce, and much more. We’re also completely distributed, meaning that everybody works from the location they choose. We’re in 69 countries and speak 84 languages! By the way, we’re hiring.
At Automattic, our mobile team works on native iOS and Android apps including WordPress for iOS and Android, WooCommerce, Crowdsignal, and Simplenote. Of those, we spend most of our time working on WordPress.
The WordPress mobile apps are completely free and open source, and while the Automattic team does most of the development, they’re community projects and anybody can contribute. They have a range of features for managing and posting to both self-hosted WordPress sites and and those hosted at WordPress.com. This covers roughly 30% of all websites on the internet! The apps are available in more than 30 localizations, have more than 100 contributors, and more than 200k daily active users.
The WordPress apps are some of the biggest open source mobile apps out there, having been in development since 2008. They’re a great way to learn more about mobile development and see how a large distributed team builds and structures complex apps. They’ve even been used by Continuous Integration platforms as a benchmark for their build times!
Most recently, we’ve been working on a mobile version of WordPress’ new block editor (our first foray into React Native); improving system integrations such as search, importing content from other apps, and media handling; improving our onboarding flows and empty states so users know how to get started and get unstuck; and creating a brand new app for WooCommerce so business owners can manage their stores from wherever they are.
We hope you’ll join us as we share our journey. If you’d like to check out the apps, they’re available on the Google Play Store and the iOS App Store, and you can find all the code on GitHub.
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