On your phone
This site can sit on your home screen as an app: its own icon, its own window without a browser bar, and four instruments that keep working when you have no connection. No App Store is involved, and nothing is installed that the site is not already.
Vorstman
On an iPhone or iPad
It has to be Safari. Chrome and Firefox cannot do this on an iPhone — that is a rule of iOS, not a choice of this site.
- Open the site in Safari.
- Tap the share button at the bottom — the square with the arrow pointing up.
- Scroll the list until you see Add to Home Screen , and tap it.
- You may change the name. Tap Add, top right.
The icon now sits among your other apps.
On Android
Chrome usually offers it by itself, with a bar at the bottom of the page: Install app. Tap that and you are done.
If it does not:
- Open the site in Chrome.
- Tap the menu button at the top right — the three dots.
- Choose Install app or Add to Home screen.
- Confirm with Install.
In Samsung Internet it is called Add page to and then Home screen.
The language you get is the one you were reading
There is not one app but three. Add it while you are on an English page and it opens on the English front page; do it from the Dutch or Spanish site and you get that one. If you want it in another language, switch language first and add it afterwards.
What is different from the browser
A short menu. In the app window there are four entries: Moria, the calendar, the moon and the Torah reading. Those are exactly the pages that work without a connection, so you never land on an entry that leads nowhere. In your ordinary browser the whole site stays as it is.
Four pages without a connection. The front page, the calendar, the moon and the Torah reading are kept on the first visit — about a megabyte and a half together. The calendar goes on reckoning offline, because that reckoning always happened on your own phone anyway. Ask for something that is not among them and the page says so plainly, rather than handing you a browser error.
New text shows at once. The app looks at the network first and only then at what it has kept. So you never read an old version of something that has since been put right.
Moria too, if you want it
Moria is a single file of nineteen megabytes. Putting that on your phone unasked would be rude, so it only happens if you ask: on the Moria page there is a button, Keep Moria on this device. You watch a bar fill up; after that Moria opens without a connection too, and the button turns into Remove — one press and those nineteen megabytes are gone again.
Do it on wifi if you can.
Taking it off again
iPhone and iPad: press and hold the icon, choose Delete App and then Remove from Home Screen.
Android: press and hold the icon and drag it to Remove, or choose Uninstall.
Nothing is left behind beyond what your browser was keeping anyway. If you had Moria on the device, take that off with the button first; otherwise the file stays until your browser tidies up.
What it is not. This is not an app from a store. There is no account, nothing is installed, and the site asks for no permission at all: no location, no camera, no contacts, no notifications. What lands on your home screen is a pointer to these pages and nothing more. There is accordingly nothing the app may do that the ordinary site may not.