I deleted the iOS WordPress app off my iPhone over the weekend. Of all the various WordPress apps, the one for the iPhone is probably the worst in my humble opinion. While I can walk through a litany of failures and annoyances, the biggest failure/annoyance is that the WordPress app hooks into the Safari browser. Here’s why that’s a problem for me.
I have my WordPress environment configured so that when someone likes or comments on a post it is indicated by an orange notification or “badge” in Apple-speak over a bell in that upper right corner of the web page. Tap that indicator/bell and a full-screen listing slides from right to left showing all the likes and comments in reverse chronological order. When I go to tap on the like or comment it further opens to the story with all the likes and comments listed beneath. When I tapped the story link, if the WordPress iOS app is installed, then the app shows the story, not the Safari browser (I do that to quickly scan the article and make sure I haven’t left any gross misspelled words or horrific grammatical errors). Calling the iOS WordPress app instead of staying in Safari is the primary problem. There is no way to configure the app from doing that. None.
If you’ve never used the WordPress app to read posts, let me tell you that the rendering is horrible. Safari might have its critics, but the problems Safari has pale to insignificance when compared to the WordPress iOS app. I hate having to use that app, either indirectly through the Safari link or explicitly. I have a number of WordPress blogs I try to follow via the reader function of the app. It’s good to have them in one place so I can browse them in reverse chronological order. But I can’t stand the way the WordPress iOS app wants to render pages. Which I find bizarre because all iOS apps are required to use the same rendering engine that Safari does when rendering web content.
The iOS WordPress app is gone. For the blogs I follow I now have a folder on Safari where I keep WordPress links. It’s not as convenient as I have to explicitly check each site for activity, but that’s the way it goes sometimes. If I really want to use a genuine WordPress app, I use the one on my iPad. While it’s a bit better than the iOS app (but not by much), it’s still not as good as just viewing the blog on Safari. There’s no way to tell the WordPress app to use Safari, just like there’s no way to stop Safari from calling up the WordPress app.
I wish the WordPress app was open source, so I could go in myself and fix these issues. I might as well wish for a unicorn to go with my six cats.
Radarwitch
The problem with your WordPress feed, Bill, is that it all (announcements about new posts and such) comes from an email address like comment-reply@wordpress.com – which isn’t very specific, nothing here points to you and to *your* site. Half of the time this goes straight into my spam folder(s) in the email program(s), so you should probably consider to personalize that a bit.
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I apologize for that. I tried to find where to make the change, and either I have to install a plugin to make that happen, or the directions for working directly with the WordPress dashboard are all out-of-date and don’t match what I see. I really would not like to install a plugin as I’ve read too many alerts about buggy WordPress plugins. I’m paranoid about maintaining strong security on my blog as far as administrative access is concerned.
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Oh I see – you’re on wordpress.com, not hosting your own version of wordpress.org (the complete package) somewhere. In that case I’m the one who has to apologize; I’ve never touched that and don’t know how to customize it… no worries, I still see your new posts as you can see :)
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