If you have been blogging from past several years, you might have noticed that now mobile phones started sending more visitors than desktops. And it’s increasing every year.
While you can surely take advantage of the Responsive design and show your visitors a mobile-friendly version of your website, it would still not be enough to make them visit your site more often.
Before we dig deeper into what tools are required for creating an app for a WordPress blog, let’s talk about why a Mobile app is better than the Mobile friendly website.
Mobile Friendly Site vs Mobile App
A Mobile friendly site (or let’s just say a website) is opened using a browser. Your regular visitors have to open the browser on their Mobile, open your website to view the content.
Apart from there being an extra step (opening the browser) to view the content on your site. Users don’t always remember to visit your site.
While the Mobile app for your site makes viewing content in just a single tap. You also have the ability to send push notifications to the users, which is helpful in bringing visitors to view your content from time to time.
Tools to create an app for WordPress
Now we talk about the main part of this post, don’t worry, it’s not going to be too technical.
If your blog is on WordPress, there are several services that let you easily create an app for your WordPress blog without having to learn coding and app design.
AppYet
I’ve used on this service to create a beautiful native app (content available offline) for one of our blogs.
AppYet has two su_plans to create Apps, One is Free and the other charges $49/year. The Free version is ad supported (AdMob) though you can get 70% of the Ad-earnings. With the Pro version, you can turn off the Ads and sell the App in Play Store.
I’ve even written a detailed post on Asiogroup detailing the process of creating an app from scratch. You can check out this guide.
Blappsta
Though there is a bit of technicality involved in creating an app using AppYet, Blappsta offers an easy tool to create an app.
You have to install the plugin and start building the app. For $34.99 it offers pretty nice features for either an iOS app or an Android app. Add more $15 and you can create both versions of your app (for both iOS and Android)
Shoutem
If you are looking for a little more feature and a native app for both iOS and Android, Shoutem can help you. For $49/month (billed annually) you can get a native app for both Android and iOS app.
Shoutem has an easy interface to create the app and a store within the app. You can check out the demo video to see the app in action.
While the list of App makers can go on and on and on, the majority of them will offer similar features with similar pricing where they charge on a monthly basis.
AppYet is the only service I’ve found that lets you create a native app. And the Free su_plan works well for those looking to monetize the app using Ads.
Apart from spending money of these services, there is a one-time fee of $25 for Creating a developer’s account on Play Store and $100/yearly is charged by Apple for a developer’s account on App Store.
