What Uruvak is
Uruvak turns your WooCommerce shop into an Android app you design yourself — here is how the pieces fit, and where Uruvak stops.
Uruvak turns a WooCommerce shop into a real Android app: your products, your prices, your checkout and your orders, wrapped in a design you build yourself in a browser. You write no code, and you never hand over your catalog — the app reads it from the store you already run. What Uruvak does not do matters just as much, so that is on this page too.
The three pieces#
Your WooCommerce store#
This stays exactly where it is. Products, prices, stock, shipping, tax, coupons, payment gateways and orders all live in WooCommerce, and the app reads them every time a shopper opens it. Change a price in wp-admin and the app shows the new price — there is nothing to re-publish. It also means the app is only as available as your store: if your shop is down or unreachable, the app has nothing to show.
The Uruvak Bridge plugin#
A small WordPress plugin you install on your own store. It is the only connection between the two sides: it serves your catalog to the app, takes the design Uruvak sends, and handles sign-in and orders for app shoppers. It is also where the link between store and account begins and ends — connecting always starts in wp-admin, and disconnecting happens there too. There is no "type your store URL here" form anywhere in Uruvak.
Uruvak#
The site at app.uruvak.com, where you do the work. Each connected store gets three tabs: Studio to design the app, Analytics to see what shoppers do in it, and Settings for your app name, icon, releases and notifications. Uruvak stores your design and builds your app file. It never stores your products or your customers.
What you end up with#
An Android app carrying your store's name and icon, with a home screen, categories, product pages and a cart that you laid out block by block. Shoppers browse natively, sign in, pay through your own WooCommerce checkout, and their orders land in wp-admin like any other order — same payment gateway, same emails, same order numbers.
When you are ready to hand it to shoppers, Uruvak compiles that app into an Android app file (an APK) and gives you a download link. From there it is yours: you create the Google Play listing and upload the file yourself. Read Get your app onto Google Play before you promise anyone a launch date.
Live Publish and releases#
This is the split that explains almost every other page. There are two completely different ways your app changes, and they cost you completely different amounts of time.
Live Publish is the everyday one. You edit your app in the Studio, press Publish Live, confirm, and the new design is live in seconds. Shoppers see it the next time they open the app. Google Play is not involved and there is nothing to review. Colors, fonts, blocks, banners, bottom tabs, which products sit on the home screen — all of it goes out this way.
A release is the rare one. Uruvak compiles a brand-new app file, which takes about ten minutes, and you upload it to Google Play yourself. Only four things force a release, because they are baked into the installed app: the app name, the app icon, the package name, and the push notification setup. Nothing else does.
One more thing worth knowing early: on the Free plan you get 5 Live Publishes for the lifetime of the account, not per month. Paid plans are unlimited. A publish that fails never costs you one, and undoing a publish is free. See Plans and limits.
What Uruvak does not do today#
A few other things readers reasonably expect and will not find:
- No marketing campaigns and no abandoned-cart or back-in-stock notifications. The only automatic notification is an order-status update, plus notifications you type and send yourself. See Push notifications.
- No revenue figures in Analytics. Analytics measures what people do inside the app — screens, products viewed, add-to-carts. It does not read your WooCommerce sales, so there is no revenue, order value or AOV anywhere on it. See Analytics.
- No password reset. If you forget your Uruvak password, the emailed sign-in code is the way back in. See Create your Uruvak account.
- Sign in with Apple is unreachable, because it only applies to iOS. Google sign-in for your shoppers does work on Android. See Google sign-in for shoppers.
None of this is hidden from you elsewhere in these docs — each page says plainly what it cannot do, in the place you would go looking for it.
Next, check your store against the list in Before you begin. It takes five minutes and it is the difference between a connection that works first time and an afternoon of "Not connected".