About

Standard.site and AT Protocol, briefly

AT Protocol is the decentralized network behind Bluesky and a growing set of independent apps — your identity and data live in a repository you control, on a Personal Data Server (PDS) you or someone you trust operates, rather than inside one company's database. For the full picture, atproto.com covers the protocol itself.

Standard.site is a publishing ecosystem built on top of that network — a shared set of record schemas for long-form writing, so publications and documents you write in one client stay portable and readable in another. Markpub, Leaflet, pckt, and Offprint are all Standard.site publishing formats; Inkwell reads and writes all four. See standard.site for the ecosystem itself.

Why a native app, not a web view

Decentralized publishing deserves a first-class native client — not a browser tab wrapped in an app shell, and not a feature bolted onto a social app that wasn't designed for long-form writing. A native app can integrate properly with the platform's secure credential storage, respect system typography and accessibility settings, work with background refresh and local notifications, and feel like it belongs on your device rather than borrowed from the web. That's the premise Inkwell starts from.

Who builds it

Inkwell is free and open-source software, licensed under the AGPL-3.0 with an App Store Distribution Exception. The exception is a narrow additional permission for app-store distribution; it does not remove the AGPL's source-availability or copyleft requirements. The source, issues, and releases are all on GitHub. If Inkwell is useful to you, you can support its development through Ko-fi or GitHub Sponsors — entirely optional, and unrelated to any feature gate.

Where things stand

iOS is the primary implementation, built with SwiftUI. Android is a Jetpack Compose port that shares a common Kotlin Multiplatform core with iOS for record handling and verification logic. It's still labelled experimental, but reading, discovery, writing, comments, verification, and background notifications are all implemented and usable today — iOS simply gets new features first. Neither app is distributed through the App Store or Play Store yet; both install from Inkwell's own self-hosted AltStore source and F-Droid repository. See Features for what each platform actually does today.

The longer-term plan is to add the Apple App Store and Google Play as optional mainstream distribution routes for a flat £5 purchase. Those builds are intended to be the same open-source app, not a premium edition: AltStore Classic on iOS and F-Droid on Android will remain free alternatives, with the source continuing to be available under the AGPL-3.0.