While you're waiting on a kbin app, you should know the mobile site is entirely functional as a mobile app. Just make a shortcut for your home screen

JoeCoT@kbin.social to /kbin meta@kbin.social – 359 points –

Apps are always nice, but lots of mobile websites, including the kbin one, are entirely functional as an app. In your browser you can just make a shortcut to them, and they'll appear on your home screen and act as an app.

In technical terms these are Progressive Web Apps, but it means you don't need to wait for someone to write an app (or kbin to have a good API for doing so) to use it like an app on your phone.

In Firefox it looks like this. Open the website, in the menu hit Install, drag the icon to your desktop. When you click on it it'll open the site like it's a standalone app.

Chrome is exactly the same, but the menu button is "Install App" instead.

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Also, at least on iOS, there’s no back button… so after I’m done reading through a post, I would have to click on the header to reload the entire page, thus starting over at the very top of the list of posts

IOS doesn't have a swipe left to go back in safari? Android it runs just like a Firefox page without the url and navigation bar but swiping works fine for me.

IOS doesn't have a swipe left to go back in safari?

It absolutely does and it works perfectly with Kbin.

Yes, swipe from the left edge and it’ll go back a page. I have been using this method since we all migrated. I used Safari and its “Add to Home Screen ” to make my shortcut.

Yeah this is my problem with it, too. No back button. The only way out is home (tap on the kbin logo to get the overlay page, then tap on the house). This happens because a shortcut from the home screen eliminates a chunk of the Safari (or in my case Firefox) UI in order to provide an app-like experience.

Other than the back button there’s no indication of whether the webpage is loading or sth. On early days when kbin is less responsive it can be confusing to know if I had tapped on the post or not.