How Reactor works, and why it’s different

We’ve been getting a lot of questions lately about how our new app builder Reactor is different from other AppPresser products.

If you want to make a mobile app out of your WordPress website, what’s the best option?

Should you purchase an AppPresser bundle, or use Reactor? What product is best for your project?

This article will help you make the best decision for your project.

How Reactor Works

Reactor is a hosted app building environment that has everything you need integrated, such as push notifications, automatic app building, stats, and more. Other AppPresser products you take and download to use on your own site.

The reason we built Reactor is to make the apps easier to build, and add more advanced features like offline functionality. Reactor apps allow for more native page transitions and design, and features like infinite scroll and pull to refresh.

The trade-off is that some custom WordPress features don’t work in the app. For example, shortcodes. If you have a shortcode that displays a contact form on your website, that won’t work in the app. Many custom plugins such as BuddyPress are not supported in Reactor.

Some things like forms can be used by opening a browser on top of the app as a workaround.

You can use custom post types, pages, WooCommerce, photo galleries, a Google Map, video, audio, and more in Reactor.

Technical Details

Reactor utilizes the Ionic Framework for the app design and structure, and integrates with WordPress via the WP API.

More features will be added to Reactor as we go, this is just the beginning.

How is that different from other AppPresser products?

AppPresser products like you find in one of our bundles work differently.

They load your whole WordPress website inside the app, similar to visiting your website in a browser. That means that shortcodes, forms, and some custom plugins will work in your app. It’s a lot easier to customize than Reactor, since you are just working with WordPress.

The tradeoff is that the app doesn’t feel as native. Nice page transitions, offline mode, pull to refresh, infinite scroll, and other features are not available.

Performance can be an issue on slow connections such as 3G, which causes the app to take a while to load.

Which should I choose?

Use Reactor…

…if performance and a native feel to the app is important, or you need features such as pull to refresh, infinite scroll, and some offline functionality.

…if building the app easily is important, and integrating push notifications is important.

…if you want advanced features like a Google Maps store locator, and more coming soon.

Keep in mind that you can’t put every feature of your WordPress site into your app. You shouldn’t think of your app as a clone of your site, instead make it a lean and mean version with only the essentials.

Use an AppPresser bundle if…

You just want to put your whole website into an app, or you cannot have any restrictions on customization. Performance and native feel are not as important as just getting the whole site into the app.

If you need to integrate BuddyPress, go with our AppBuddy bundle.

Still not sure? Email us with a description of your project and we’ll make a recommendation.

I hope that helps!