Yep. Then you find Voyager, vger.app where you install that website as an app, now you get a similar Apollo experience from the “old Reddit days.” That’s what I’ve used since day 3.
I just miss the rich text editing that Lemmy offers. I don’t care to learn the code or type it out. Eventually I’d like Voyager to get an app in the App Store as an option to build in these extra features.
Some websites can be directly "installed" in you app drawer. They are really like an advanced shortcut for the mobile webpage.
You probably haven't seen it a lot because commercial webs that want to shove their propietary app down your throat disable this option.
But both Lemmy and Mastodon have it enabled.
To do so, click on options on your desired browser and you'll find an "addto startup page" option or something along those lines.
I believe they are referred to as PWA or progressive web app. I'm using Voyager ( formerly wefwef) right now and it's a pretty solid experience. Been bouncing back and forth between this and Memmy since day one. Voyager is my favorite because it feels like Apollo.
I just checked my phone (android) and it doesn't work on lemmy.world, I don't have the install option in the page menu.
Other pages, e.g. any discuss forums, will have an extra menu option that allows me to install the page in the home screen / system menu. When installed like that, the shortcut will open a special version of the browser without the ability to navigate away from the page.
interesting. But that seems to rely on Chrome, which I've removed. I'm using Duckduckgo as main browser instead. So I just fireproof the login, bookmark and I'm good. Thanks for the explanation, though.
edit: there seems to be a sandboxed webapps browser on f-droid
You can also use Firefox/Fennec/Mull/whatever to use PWAs. On F-Droid, there's an app called Native Alpha that uses the system's Webview (Chromium based).
@sneezy Yeap, all browsers still have it as an option in the main menu, lots of sites still have metadata to present it as fullscreen too so it feels like a proper app.