WPTouch to Cross 4 Million Downloads

Published

May 3, 2013

3 Comments

It’s hard to imagine a WordPress world without Brave New Code and their much-heralded plugin, WPTouch, which at this very moment is set to cross the 4 million download mark probably by the end of the weekend I would imagine.

Incredible, and much congrats to the team behind it that have created a solid and growing business with their premium upgrade product of WPTouch Pro, which just saw version 3.0 get some serious upgrades.

In fact, here’s another interesting fact about WPTouch as a whole:

WPTouch is actually used by 31% of the top mobile-powered WordPress blogs out there:

WPtouch provides the best mobile experience for your site visitors but you don’t have to take our word on that; just ask the top mobile-powered WordPress blogs on the web which mobile solution is the best. In April 2012, 49 of the top 100 blogs were running on WordPress. Among those 49 sites, of the sites that employed a mobile solution, 31% used WPtouch or WPtouch Pro.

Not too shabby for a bunch of guys that were originally just trying to scratch their own itch, sotospeak!

These guys have been working together for some time and obviously love what they do, which really does matter in terms of the overall quality of their product.

In a recent overview video of their company, they share their story about how they first started and how they began to grow – I especially like how they tossed back a beer, hit the “on” switch, and then went to bed to wake up to a few customers:

Well done good sirs (although I’m not sure if I’d have another beer for breakfast!).

If what they are sharing is true then they have a million-dollar business and growing. With over 25,000 customers with their pricing it’s not hard to see where they are going as a team.

Congrats to the team and best of luck in the near and far future! It’ll be interesting to see how they continue to iterate and grow with a more heightened sense of awareness around mobile-ready sites and many WordPress themes having responsive technology build right-in.

Have you ever used WPTouch? I know it was a must-have on my list for a long time!

There are 3 comments

May 3, 2013 #

AJ

I like the idea of WPTouch but it has never been trouble-free in my experience. Improper device recognition is more common than it should be, where it displays on desktop browsers rather than only mobile. That can be hard to detect in testing environments and it seems entirely random, but with a sizable audience you’ll certainly get emails about it from people complaining. It can also be a total mess to implement with the (notoriously flaky) caching plugins out there, particularly if the site has a large amount of traffic. Those two issues may be related, but in combination can take a long time to troubleshoot and work through.

In my view, if you have to spend more than a few hours configuring it, then just make your layout responsive instead, even if it’s half-arsed and only dumps the sidebar below the content block – indeed, the laziest responsive design ever. If you can get WPTouch working flawlessly in short order though, it’s a great solution for a quick mobile friendly site.

I’d love to hear others experience with it, I haven’t tried it in about a year so perhaps much of the headaches are lessened.
May 3, 2013 #

BraveNewCode

Hi AJ!

Thanks for the feedback and for your interest in WPtouch.

We have implemented a number of new updates to WPtouch over the past year so you may want to give it another try. If you’d like a hand, our support team would be happy to assist with troubleshooting. You can reach our support team at support[at]bravenewcode[dot]com.
May 3, 2013 #

Curtis McHale

I still use WPTouch Pro for mobile sites. Typically I’m leveraging the detection stuff (which I haven’t had issues with) and skipping most of the theme stuff bundled. I am super excited to use version 3 since it does a much better job of only making you load the parts you need.

Many of the mobile sites I’ve had to build have required totally different content on desktop vs mobile. I’ve never found a way to do that reliably without WPTouch.

How do you stay on top of your WordPress game?