The WordPress iOS app has indeed improved over time, especially for writing a blog post, but still not enough to be a solid official client, in my opinion. I don’t know you, but the main reason I installed this app on my iOS devices was to manage my blogs, rather than using it as an on-the-go solution to write on them, or to ‘interact’ with other WordPress blogs in the same way one does with Tumblr, for example.
Therefore, in its current state, and for my current needs, the WordPress app is of no real use to me. There are a few little annoying things, interface-wise, which have led me to get rid of it.
1. The mildest peeve is visible in the figure above: the default section when you open the app is Reader. Since I’m not following any blogs, I keep getting this screen. It would make more sense that the app defaulted to the Me section, wouldn’t it?
2. When you get a notification, and you go and act on it, the action buttons have no feedback. In the example above, I received a comment which I need to mark as spam. When I tap on the flag icon, nowhere in the interface I get a confirmation that my action was registered, and I’m left with the doubt whether the app has acted on it or not.
3. When I return to the Notification screen, some comments in the moderation queue are marked as Pending, even after dealing with them. At first I didn’t know why this happened, then I remembered that I had handled those comments via the admin interface in the browser on my Mac. Evidently the app doesn’t sync what gets moderated outside the app. The result may be confusing, especially when you tap again those Pending comments, try processing them again, and nothing appears to happen because of the aforementioned ‘no feedback’ problem.
Wherefore art thou, Poster?
In June 2013, Automattic acquired the great Poster, a WordPress iOS client by Tom Witkin. I personally find a bit infuriating that they removed Poster from the App Store, when they could have simply rebranded it and make it the official WordPress client, like Twitter did with Tweetie. Poster had a really nice interface and was definitely more mature an app. Instead, at least for now, we’re left with this rather bland offering.