I’m proud to announce that we’ll be shipping the first public version of the block editor in the apps with their 11.9 release. This release will be available for beta testers today (learn more about testing the apps), and the general public in March 11th.
What to expect
![](https://webarchive.library.unt.edu/web/20190429214012im_/https://make.wordpress.org/mobile/files/2019/02/block-editor-v1.0-demo_FINAL.2019-02-26-08_29_03.gif)
For this first version, our main focus was to build a pleasant writing experience with support for the most basic types of content.
Our data showed that 90%+ of the posts created on the mobile apps consisted of basic text and images, so we decided to focus on supporting the Paragraph, Image, and Heading blocks on this version.
Within those limits, we wanted this to be functional and usable as a replacement editor from the start, so we did a lot of work on making sure the little things that you would expect to work on an editor were there: pressing enter would create a new paragraph block, support for undoing and redoing edits, basic formatting,…
Known issues
- On iOS, using typing suggestions sometimes removes spaces between words.
- On iOS, dictation doesn’t work at the moment.
- On Android, when you insert a Heading block it initially shows no formatting.
How to test the block editor in the apps
Once you have version 11.9 of the apps, the block editor will be available, but not always used by default. When you edit an existing post, it will detect if it has block content and open it in the block editor, otherwise it will open in the classic editor. If you prefer to edit a post with blocks in the classic editor you can still do so by going to the editor menu (•••) and choosing “Switch to Classic Editor”.
When you create a new post, it will use the classic editor by default. To change that, you can go to Me > App Settings and enable the Use Block Editor option, and every new post will be created in the block editor.
What’s next
After the release, we will start working on some UX improvements and visual refinements that didn’t make it in time, and any major bugs that comes up. Shortly after that we’ll also spend time adding support for the most common blocks and use cases.
Get involved
You can follow along on the Gutenberg and gutenberg-mobile Github repos, and if you have any questions or want to get involved, you can discuss here or find us in the #core-editor and #mobile rooms in WordPress.org Slack.