Quickstart: from store to app
The whole path in one sitting — install the plugin, connect your store, design the app, take your first release, and put it on your own phone.
This is the shortest complete path from a WooCommerce shop to an app you can hold. It takes about half an hour, and ten minutes of that is waiting for a build machine — start it when you have a cup of tea nearby. Every step below is a short version of a longer page; follow the link when you want the detail. Do the steps in this order, because two of them lock things that cannot be changed later.
Before you start#
You need a WooCommerce shop that is live on the public internet (not localhost, not behind a password), administrator access to its wp-admin, and a phone running Android. WordPress 6.0 or newer, PHP 8.1 or newer. If you are not sure about any of that, read Before you begin first — five minutes there saves an hour later.
You do not need a Uruvak account yet. You can create one in the middle of step 2, or make it now from Create your Uruvak account.
Connect your store#
Install the Uruvak Bridge plugin
Download the plugin from the WordPress plugin link in the uruvak.com menu — or, if you already have an account, from Download plugin (.zip) on the dashboard home. Then, on your own site: wp-admin › Plugins › Add New › Upload Plugin, choose the .zip, install, activate.
A new Uruvak Bridge item appears in the wp-admin sidebar, between WooCommerce and Appearance. Only administrators can see it. There is nothing to configure in it — no keys, no addresses.
Install the Uruvak Bridge plugin · about 5 minutes
Click Connect with Uruvak
Open wp-admin › Uruvak Bridge and press Connect with Uruvak →. Your browser goes to app.uruvak.com. Sign in, or create your account there — you are returned to the approval card automatically, with your store details intact.
The card names your shop and the account you are signed in as. Press the button at the bottom, which reads Connect followed by your own domain. WordPress reloads and shows the green notice Store connected., the status pill flips to Connected, and the top button becomes Open Uruvak Builder →.
Connect your store to Uruvak · about 2 minutes
Do not wander off in the middle of this. The code that links the two sides is good for five minutes, and pressing Back or reloading the returned page invalidates it. Both failures are harmless: go back to wp-admin › Uruvak Bridge and press Connect with Uruvak → again.
Design the app#
Pick a template
Back on app.uruvak.com, your shop is now a tile under Stores. Click it and the Studio opens. Because the app is empty, the template gallery opens by itself: five complete designs under ✨ Full app templates — Ember (marked Default), Atelier, Verde, Onyx and Peak. Press Use this app on the one closest to your shop. It fills all four pages, the header, the bottom tabs and the colors in one go.
You are not stuck with it. Applying another template later replaces every page, and Uruvak asks you to confirm before it does.
Start from a template · about 1 minute
Arrange the blocks
The left rail is your page, top to bottom, as a list of blocks. The Page dropdown switches between the four pages you design: Home, Category, Product and Cart. Add block offers only the blocks that are legal on the page you are on, and drops the new one at the bottom. Drag the six-dot grip to reorder. The ✕ on a row removes that block immediately — no confirmation, no undo, so re-add it if you misclick.
The phone in the middle redraws as you type, using your real products when your store answers (a chip above it reads ● live store data). There is no Save button: the draft saves itself about a second after you stop, and the top bar reads Draft saved. None of this is visible to shoppers yet.
Give this the time it deserves — it is the only part of the job that is actually about your shop. The Studio, Every block, and what it does, Colors, fonts and theme · 15 minutes, or an afternoon
Name it and give it an icon#
Set the app name, icon and package name
Open the Settings tab, section General, card App identity.
App name is what sits under the icon on a phone's home screen. Type it and press Save name.
App icon takes a PNG or JPEG that is square and at least 1024×1024. Anything else is refused on the spot with the exact reason — for example The icon must be square — this image is 1200×800.
Package name is your app's permanent identifier: a fixed
com.uruvak.prefix plus a short suffix you choose, checked for availability as you type. Press Save package name.App name, icon and package name · about 5 minutes
Take your first release#
Build the Android app
Still in Settings, open the Releases section and press Release Android app (APK). Confirm in the dialog headed Take a new release? with Release app.
A row appears in the history and moves through Queued → Building → Ready. It takes roughly ten minutes and the list refreshes itself, so you can leave the tab open or come back later.
Two things happen here that matter. Whatever your Studio looks like at the moment you confirm becomes your live design — which is why you designed first, and it costs you nothing from your publish allowance. And finishing this build is what unlocks Live Publish for good.
This is true of the first release only. Every release after it carries the design you last published, not the draft on your screen — so from then on, publish live first, then release.
Take a release · 1 minute, then about 10 minutes of waiting
Install it on your own phone
When the row reads Ready, press ⬇ Download. You get an .apk file.
The quickest way onto your phone is to open the dashboard on the phone itself and download it there, or to email the file to yourself. Tap the downloaded file; Android will ask whether to allow installs from whatever app you downloaded it with, and once you allow it the app installs like any other. Open it. That is your shop — your products, your prices, your categories, pulled live through the plugin.
about 3 minutes
Publish live#
Push your design to shoppers
Go back to the Studio tab. The orange Publish Live button in the top bar is now enabled — before your first release it was greyed out with Take your first release to unlock → beside it.
Press it, confirm in Publish to your live app?, and the design reaches every installed app within seconds. A dark bar appears at the bottom reading Published. Your users get this the next time they open the app. with an Undo link beside it. Undo is free and instant, but it only lives in that bar — once you dismiss it, it is gone.
From now on, colors, blocks, screens, products and text all go out this way. You never build again for those. Publish live · seconds
On the free plan the button counts down — Publish Live · 4 left — because Free includes five Live Publishes for the lifetime of the account, not five a month. A publish that fails never costs one, and Undo never costs one. Plans and limits has the rest.
What to do if it goes wrong#
"Connection state mismatch — please try again." You reloaded or went back during the handshake. Press Connect with Uruvak → again; nothing is broken.
"Could not connect. Invalid or expired connect code" More than five minutes passed between approving on Uruvak and landing back in WordPress. Start the connect again.
wp-admin says Connected, Uruvak says Not connected. Those two are not the same check. WordPress is remembering; Uruvak is calling your shop right now and waiting five seconds for an answer. A staging site, a password-protected site, aggressive caching in front of WordPress, "Plain" permalinks or a wrong server clock all produce exactly this. When the connection breaks works through each one.
The build says Failed. No reason is shown to you — the product does not surface build logs. Take the release again; if it fails twice, contact support with your store name.
The build is still Queued after half an hour. That is not your app's fault and there is nothing on the screen to fix. Contact support.
"Nothing changed that needs a release. Publish live instead — it's instant." Exactly what it says. Only four things are baked into the app file: the app name, the package name, the icon, and the files behind push notifications and Google sign-in. Everything else — colors, blocks, screens, products, text — goes out with Publish Live.
More of them, word for word, in Error messages, decoded.
You now have an app on your phone and a design you can change in seconds. The last mile — a Google Play developer account, the listing, and what Uruvak does and does not do for you there — is Get your app onto Google Play.