I apologize if this has already been covered, but I’ve seen a lot of people talking about a need for a kbin app. While I agree that a native app would be nice to have eventually, I figured that quite a few people probably aren’t aware of how web apps work. I don’t use Android, so I have no idea if there is an equivalent way to do this on Android phones.
If you are looking at kbin in Safari, simply click the share button (looks like a square with an arrow pointing up) and scroll down to the option “Add to Home Screen.” Click this, set the name to whatever you want, and voila.
You should have a kbin “app” on your Home Screen that opens in its own, closable window separate from Safari.
You can also do this with Lemmy if you miss the functions that Mlem is lacking. I’m using web apps for both, kbin and Lemmy, myself.
The major downside of a web app is that it isn’t as fast as a native app could be. However, a major upside of web apps is that they don’t have nearly as many permissions and hidden functionality as native apps. So, for example, you could replace the native Facebook app with the web app if you’re concerned about data on your phone.
This feature has been there since iOS 1.0. Originally this was the way Apple envisioned how ‘apps’ on iPhone were going to work. Only with iOS 2.0 did Apple add the app store and support for native apps. And the rest is history.
What's new, however is a a feature in Safari that gives Web apps saved to the home screen special privileges, such as the ability to request to send notifications through web push https://webkit.org/blog/13878/web-push-for-web-apps-on-ios-and-ipados/