Rook & Stone is based on the Discourse software, which is a pretty incredible set of tools developed by some amazing people for just about the best reason I can think of: increasing civil discourse on the internet.
You may have noticed, even lamented, that your app store (be it robotic or fruit-themed) lacks a mobile app for this site. Maybe you noticed that there is a Discourse Hub app. Now, the Discourse Hub app is pretty cool if you belong to a few different Discourse forums, like I do, and want a single, aggregated view of what’s happening across all those sites.
Well, for those of you who want a mobile app: there is a solution!
Even better, you don’t have to install anything. See, Rook & Stone is what’s called a Progressive Web App - a PWA for short. A PWA is like a website because you can access it from a web browser, but it can also be like a phone app - it’s the best of both worlds!
On your phone, you can (optionally) add Rook & Stone as an app by doing the following:
Chrome (and Chromium-based browsers like Brave, Edge, etc.)
My personal recommendation is to drop Google Chrome in favor of a privacy-respecting browser, but to each their own.
- Open your web browser
- Load https://rookandstone.com
- Note: Chrome will likely prompt you to “install” or “add to home screen”
- Navigate into the browser menu
- Find and click “Add to phone”
- Approve the installation
Firefox Mobile
- Open your web browser
- Load https://rookandstone.com
- Navigate into the browser menu
- Find and click “Add app to Home screen”
- Approve the installation
Safari
Frankly, Apple and iOS are kind of antagonistic to anything that’s outside of their App Store, so if you want the full PWA experience, you should probably use a privacy-respecting Chromium-based browser.
- Open your web browser
- Load https://rookandstone.com
- Navigate into the browser menu
- Find a click an icon of a square with an arrow pointing out of the top of it
- Click “Add to Home Screen” on the menu bar
- Click “Add” in the upper right corner
And enjoy!
Why not have a “normal” mobile app?
Well… there’s not really any such thing. There are a few apps out there that actually install and run on your phone’s hardware like desktop applications of yore used to do. By and large, though, “apps” that you’ve installed don’t do much more than launch a webpage and make it so that you can’t run an ad-blocker on them.
Why would Apple dislike PWAs?
The iPhone and Android app stores both charge massive fees to app-makers who process any sorts of payments through their apps. “Massive” here meaning 35%, on every transaction. So if you, say, sign up for $10/month subscription, or buy $10 worth of cat food through a phone app - rather than going directly to the vendor’s website - that vendor gets charged $3.50 of your payment by the app store. Apple has a much tighter control over its app store and devices than Google does, and they really want to get their 35% cut, so they don’t put a lot of effort in to developing and supporting technologies (like PWA) that live outside of their revenue stream. It’s… not a great situation.
What do you mean by “privacy-respecting browser”?
Apple, Instagram/Facebook, Google, etc. make most of their money through selling space to advertisers (and creaming 35% payments off of other people’s work), and they make that advertising space seem really, really lucrative by aggressively prying into our personal behaviors and spying on everything that we do online. Some browsers (Firefox, Brave) are built to block their spying, others (Chrome, Safari) are built to spy for days. Cover Your Tracks is a great tool for identifying how easy it is for your browser to track you.