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.
It works alright, but it isn’t entirely functional. It took me about 20 tries to actually click on the post on mobile. I have no idea why sometimes trying to come into a post just won’t work at all
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.
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.
I think it’s actually from the site errors. When tapping on a post isn’t working, I pull up the site on a regular browser and get the 500 errors.
thats my experience also… first time it happened to me was right after a post I made about how kbin just works well… it made me chuckle
I found that it’s really clunky in firefox on Android. I switched to Chrome and it’s much smoother and more responsive. I’m not sure why that is though.