AppPresser Updates November 2022

Hasn’t 2022 flown by? We’ve been keeping our heads down working both to help you build your apps in support and improve the product behind the scenes. Let’s recap and highlight some of the improvements we’ve made over the last few months:

Google Play Compatibility Updates

We aren’t the only ones who have been busy. Google Play has pushed out a number of new requirements recently including forcing the use of the V4 Google Play Billing Library and the removal of general support for the REQUEST_INSTALL_PACKAGES permission. We’ve patched our build files to be compliant with both of these changes and if you get messages from Google Play regarding these all you need to do is run a new Google Play build and submit that as an update (Don’t forget to increment your version number 😉 )

Android 12 Compatibility Fixes

While a little dated now that Android 13 has now hit the scene, we did discover some issues, particularly with push notifications on Android 12 earlier this year as more devices got the update rolled out. These should all be resolved. If you haven’t run a Google Play build in the last 6 months or have any users on Android reporting issues with push notifications running a new Google Play build and submitting an update to the store should ensure you have these fixes in your live app.

Customizer Menu Assignments

If you’ve used multiple apps within AppPresser before you may have been confused that your menus from one app were visible in another app. This was a limitation of the WordPress menu system and a frustrating quirk for our Agency and Reseller customers that manage many apps. Thankfully, we’ve been able to rewrite and resolve this completely and you’ll now only see the menus relating to that specific app in the customizer.

AppPresser Bridge Plugin

A longstanding request we’ve had is the ability to use your existing WordPress theme inside the app instead of the AP3 Ion Theme. This also comes up when a user has a theme with embedded functionality that doesn’t work in the app because the AP3 Ion Theme is active instead.

The AppPresser Bridge plugin is our answer to this request. Put simply, it moves all of the key functionality required to allow the iFrame pages to communicate with the native parts of the app into a plugin that makes the app iFrame pages theme-independent.

While this approach is more flexible, it does come with more work involved. As your existing WordPress theme likely already has a header, footer and other elements that the app provides natively, you’ll need to add custom CSS to hide these excess elements. The AppPresser Bridge plugin has a settings menu to store these CSS changes so that they only affect pages loaded in your app and don’t change your live website. For more info, check out the docs.

Just to be clear, the AP3 Ion Theme isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Unless you specifically want to try using your own theme in the app you can ignore this and keep using the AP3 Ion Theme.