Mobile and home-screen installation#

Open your Roost HTTPS address in Safari, then choose Share → Add to Home Screen and open it as a web app. Roost provides a standalone manifest, app icons, and an Apple touch icon. The page and browser chrome follow the device's light/dark appearance. The installed iOS status bar overlays a safe-area-padded header.

Startup at / reopens the last agent visited in this browser or home-screen app. The choice is stored locally on the device. If the agent is missing, storage is unavailable, or no agent has been visited yet, startup shows the agent list. Direct links keep their destination. Tap roost in navigation to open the list without being redirected; an empty workspace offers Create an agent.

On phones, the document stays fixed while the conversation or settings content scrolls inside it. While the keyboard is closed, browser tabs use the dynamic viewport (100dvh), while installed standalone apps use the full viewport (100vh) for both the document and app shell. iOS can underreport dynamic and percentage heights in standalone mode, leaving a bottom gap. Safe-area padding is applied inside that full height, once at the header and composer. While an input is focused and the keyboard reduces the available height, the app follows the visual viewport's height and top offset. On blur it removes those overrides, including when iOS retains a stale visual viewport size. The composer uses 16px text to avoid input zoom and removes the home-indicator inset while the keyboard occupies that space.

Production builds register a service worker that caches immutable build assets, supports push notifications, and supplies an offline screen when a navigation cannot reach the server. It does not cache conversations, credentials, attachments, HTML pages, or API responses. See startup measurements and notification setup. Updates arrive on the next page load; an active conversation is never automatically reloaded. Roost still requires a connection to its server to send messages or control the computer.

Home-screen icon links use versioned PNGs from Roost's public GitHub repository. iOS may fetch these without the browser's authentication cookie, so serving them behind an authenticated private proxy can produce a blank icon. Only public branding assets use this URL; the app, conversations, and desktop remain authenticated. The SVG favicon and local PNG copies are also included in every release.

After an update, reload the page. If iOS retains an old home-screen icon or launch appearance, remove the shortcut and add it again. Desktop WebKit emulation covers layout checks, but keyboard animation and installed status-bar behavior also need checking on a physical iPhone.

The standalone height workaround follows WebKit bug 254868. If installed before the status-bar metadata was added, iOS may require removing and re-adding the home-screen app; WebKit bug 316008 describes metadata captured at install time that does not update afterward.