07 · App and offline reading

The site declares itself an installable app: an icon on the home screen, its own colour, opening without an address bar. This is not a separate app to be released in a store — it is the same site, installed. It updates along with the site and needs nobody's approval to publish.

On top of that comes the offline bundle: a list of recent entries fetched in advance, together with their images. A reader stepping onto the underground already has them. Entries hidden with their series do not enter the bundle, because the bundle draws its content from the same list as the stream.

There is also a mechanism that notices the deployment has moved past an open tab. An app left in the background for a week could show a week-old version and not know it; now it checks the release marker and refreshes itself.