There's an app for that

I spent some time this week doing some maintenance on this here website and found myself going down a bit of a rabbit hole regarding optimizing for mobile screens, so much so that I made an Android app for the site. So if you have an Android phone, congratulations, you may run the new StarshipTim app on it.

It's not special, really. Basically it's the site as it is if you open it on your phone in Chrome. But it's got its own little icon to tap and open up without having to navigate around your browser.

Basically, I made it for my dad since he can never get to the site without google-searching for it first. But he might not even use it because you have to install it manually; it's not like I'm going to pay to put it in the GooglePlay store. Screw that.

But if anyone wants to give it a go, download this file to your Android phone: Starship.apk

Once it's in your downloads, open the Files app, go to Downloads if you're not already there, tap the three-dot icon for a menu and select "install." You may then have to give permission to install apps from places not controlled by Google, but just do it, it's your phone, you don't need Google's permission. It may then try to scan the app for nefarious code, that's fine, it's just an annoying delay of a few seconds. That's it, you've got your app. It'll show up in your Apps list and you can add the icon to your homescreen shortcuts if you want to.

You'd think my doing this means I now know how to do Android-specific code, but no, not really, I had a hell of a time getting this to work at all and this is, like, rudimentary. Android Studio is not exactly intuitive if you're just flying by the seat of your pants. In the end I used a third-party conversion tool instead.

Apple being Apple, iOS apps are more difficult/expensive to make, so you iPhone folks are hosed. Sorry. Blame Tim Cook.