v0.24.0: the app opens on a plane
The app opens on a plane
Launching the installed app in airplane mode showed the sign-in screen, with the chapters you had downloaded
for exactly this sitting on the device, unreachable. Tapping a chapter inside an already-running app has
worked since v0.20.0; a cold start never has, and the code said so — the browser tests carried a note calling
it out of scope, and v0.20.0's own changelog admitted it.
Two things were being thrown away. The session check could not tell "the server rejected you" from "there is
no server to ask": both came back as a plain no, and a plain no means sign in. And the signed-in account was
remembered only in memory, while every downloaded chapter is filed under whose it is — so even past the
sign-in screen the reader would have found nothing, which is a worse failure, because it reads as though the
downloads are gone.
Now a device that had a session keeps it when the server is simply unreachable, and opens on your Downloads
with a banner naming the account. The reader works exactly as it does in a tunnel today. Everything needing
the server is dimmed rather than hidden, because there is nothing behind it until you reconnect — and the
moment you do, it checks in, clears the banner and sends up whatever you read.
The part that took the most care is the part nobody sees. This is a multi-user app and household devices get
shared, so: signing out ends it immediately — the next offline launch asks for a password and lists nothing,
though the files stay on disk and become readable again when that account signs back in. If the server ever
answers that the session is gone, the device signs itself out. The grace expires exactly when the login
itself would have, which the server now tells the app rather than the app assuming. And nothing new is
stored that could serve as a credential: the record says who you were, not how to prove it.
Right-to-left manga also read its double-page spreads in the wrong order offline. The downloaded chapter had
carried the reading direction all along; the reader threw it away and left a comment saying the information
was not available, one field from where it was.
A README the size of its category
504 lines and 4,797 words, against a median of 132 and 743 across Komga, Kavita, Mihon, Stump, Suwayomi and
Audiobookshelf. The install section alone was longer than five of those six READMEs in their entirety, and
44 lines of it warned about upgrade problems from v0.9.0 and earlier — fourteen releases ago, and already
written down in this file.
It is 141 lines now. Almost nothing was deleted: the platform-by-platform install moved to docs/INSTALL.md,
the environment variables to docs/CONFIGURATION.md, and the comparison against other readers to
docs/COMPARISON.md, where a table making dated claims about five moving projects is less likely to be the
second thing a visitor reads.