MOBILE APP DEVELOPMENT

Names: Santiago Bolaños Vega (201514952)

Nicolas Francisco Abondano (201812467)
Date: September 5th, 2021

Contenido
App Description.................................................................................................................................1
Repo Description...............................................................................................................................3
Business questions (BS).....................................................................................................................6
References.........................................................................................................................................7

WORDPRESS FOR ANDROID – APP REPORT

App Description

WordPress is a hosted software as a service (SaaS) platform where you can design your own
webpage/blog using some prebuilt blocks. According to WordPress site information, the 38% of all
websites on the internet are built using this framework (The WordPress.com Team, 2021), it means
that it can easily adapt to whatever the users need. As an example, in business some of the most
common usages are sites for online booking, building a marketplace, classifieds base, job boards,
real estate listings, but the possibilities are almost unlimited (Wheeler, 2019). Besides, as it was
originally conceived for a site for creating blogs, it allows users to share content in post without
changing the site page directly, just like social media. You can also comment posts, receive
comments, and manage all the content you publish. You can also find the reader feature, where it is
possible to find what is new in other sites and to stay tuned.

As it has been seen, WordPress is important in terms of internet content. The app’s first release
happened years later (in Android and iOS) than the web application. It doesn´t handle the same
exact functionalities but is robust enough to support the 6 core features: create, publish,
notifications, publish, reader and share (WordPress Features, 2018). Here is an example of how the
app looks and how the features are displayed:
Figure 1. App Interface

The app is not conceived to replace the web functionalities, but to support it. For that reason, its
revenue channels remain. WordPress offers to its users 4 different plans and prices according to
their needs, besides the free plan. The plans and prices are detailed in the image:

Figure 2. WordPress plans

Or course, the free plan is very limited, especially in terms of interaction with the page visitors. But
to keep the free features free, WordPress displays ads on free blogs and sites. This advertising is a
secondary but important revenue channel.

The app has +10M downloads and has a punctuation of 4.4 on Play Store. Currently, 64 million sites
on the internet use WordPress and 409 million people view more thar 20 million pages each month.
It means that the general target is considerably wider that the app’s. However, there is a significant
amount of people that download and use the application. Our hypothesis is that the people that use
the app, are those who need to be frequently informed about notifications, what’s new and the site
statistics.

What we found interesting about the app at first is that we didn’t expect it to be open source. This is
fantastic because everybody is welcome, you can be part or a large community that works together
to improve and deliver new features. This fact is surprising because of its presence across the
internet. One would think that the “recipe” of something that huge, shouldn’t be public. Another
thing we found interesting about WordPress is that it “democratizes” the content that people can
publish on internet and not only to reduce to the existing social media. Probably, some years ago, if
you needed to design a web site for your entrepreneurship, you would have needed a software
engineering. Now you just must design the site using the WordPress toolkit and having knowledge
about programming is not mandatory. Besides, with the app release you can manage almost
everything just from your phone.

Repo Description
To get a better understanding of the application we are going to describe some characteristics of the
repository of the application (wordpress-mobile/WordPress-Android: WordPress for Android
(github.com)).

There are a total of 460 K lines of code as seen in the figure 3. We obtained this data by downloading
the repository and using CLOC (AlDanial/cloc: cloc counts blank lines, comment lines, and physical
lines of source code in many programming languages. (github.com)) to calculate the number of lines
of source code. The repository of WordPress is written mostly in Kotlin (59.4%) and Java (39.7%), but
we can see that they also have some files with other languages like Ruby, Shell, Python and even CSS

Figure 3. Lines of code of the repository.

This repository has a total of 60.000 commits as seen in figure 5, and the total of branches is 396 as
seen in figure 4 but has only 50 active branches besides the main one. Also watching the main
branch, it has multiple commits every weekday (Monday - Friday), showing the laboral time of the
developers at WordPress.
Figure 4. Total branches.

Figure 5. Number of commits.

The repository also has a build of instructions, where they explain how to use it with Android Studio,
and that you need to have nvm installed on your computer. It uses OAuth2 Authentication and
requires users to generate a client ID and client secret key, this can be done on the developer's page
for WordPress, where they can create an application. This can be seen in figures 6 and 7.

Figure 6. Build Instructions

Figure 7. OAuth 2 Authentication Instructions

The application has also more than 1.3 K forks and 153 collaborators, showing a lot of support by
developers to create new and innovative features, inside and outside the company as seen in figure
8.

Figure 7. Forks, Contributors, and releases

Business questions (BS)

1. What are the offered features (inside or outside the current plan) that users with the same
kind of pages/purposes use? (Type 2)

Data Source: Sites Information Database. The purpose consists in identify similar sites and
the features and plugins that can be implemented to improve the page visitor experience.
Information Delivery: The information about the possible new features or plugins that can
be implemented could be shown as reminder notifications when using or not the app. Also,
when the user visits the features interface, it could appear a popup reminder with this
information (just for once).

2. How long ago the user site/blog received its last visitor? (Type 2)

Data Source: Sites Interaction Database. The purpose is to stablish the last date when the
page/blog received a visitor and alert the user if the last date happened in a considerable
time ago. It could be a configurable feature because the user can establish what could be an
appropriate long period without having a visitor.
Information Delivery: The information could be delivered as a reminder notification. Also, it
could be show as a popup notification when the user opens the app.

3. What are the percentages of people stopped using WordPress for their website by web
category? (Type 3 and 4)

Data Source: Domain services database and the Website information database. The purpose
is to establish the domains that were in WordPress, but later left the platform and stopped
being used in WordPress and appeared in other platforms, or in no one at all. Then they can
simply apply a tag filter by the category of the website.
Information Delivery: The information could be delivered to the administrators by a bar
chart graphic, with each important category, and the different percentages.
Benefit: The administrators can see what type of websites are not finding what they want
with WordPress, so they can create new features that appeal to these types of sites. Also,
what new plugins they can implement with third party companies that will facilitate the
development of the type of websites that are leaving the company.

4. What are number of viewers using WordPress developed websites by web category? (Type 3
and 4)

Data Source: Website information database and the telemetry database for the mobile app.
The purpose is to stablish the total viewers in mobiles of the websites developed in
WordPress and group them by type or tag.

Information Delivery: The information could be delivered to the administrators by a bar

chart graphic, with each important category, and the different viewer's number.

Benefit: The administrators can see which websites developed in WordPress attract more of
their audience on mobile. With this, they can develop some advertising strategies in those
groups and incentivize them, even more, to create their websites in WordPress. In addition,
 administrators can ask the developers of these groups and see what can further improve
their experience in developing websites used in word press.

References

WordPress Features. (2018, March 28). WordPress.Org. https://wordpress.org/about/features/

The WordPress.com Team. (2021, June 24). What is Used For? WordPress.Com.
https://wordpress.com/go/website-building/what-is-wordpress-com-used-for/

Wheeler, D. (2019, August 29). 14 Awesome Things You Can Do With WordPress (Besides Blogging).
WP Engine. https://wpengine.com/blog/14-uses-wordpress/