Features
Inkwell is a native reader and writer for the Standard.site publishing ecosystem. Here's what that means in practice, on both iOS and Android.
Read
Inkwell renders content natively rather than loading a web view. It understands four Standard.site formats: Markpub Markdown (plain long-form writing), Leaflet's block and blob pages (rich layouts with embedded media), pckt's block arrays, and Offprint's block arrays — each converted and rendered in the app's own reading surface, with your system's Dynamic Type and light/dark theme respected throughout. Every document is fetched straight from its owning PDS, not a cached copy on a third-party server.
Discover
Search the cross-platform public index to find publications across the Standard.site ecosystem, then subscribe to the ones you want to follow. Background refresh polls subscriptions periodically and raises a local notification when one has a new document — on-device, with no push provider and no server-side notification infrastructure involved. A notification list keeps a history you can review or clear, and a Settings toggle turns the OS banner off without losing that list.
Write
Compose in Markdown and publish directly to your own PDS in your choice of format — Markpub, Leaflet, pckt, or Offprint. Because the underlying record is a standard AT Protocol record in your repository, your writing isn't locked into Inkwell: any client that speaks the same lexicons can read, edit, or migrate it. That's the point of publishing on your own PDS instead of a platform's database.
AT Protocol native
Signing in opens your system browser once, where you approve access directly with your PDS using OAuth 2.1 — the same flow as signing into a website with your identity provider. Inkwell never sees or stores your account password or an app password. Day to day, this means the browser handshake happens once at login; after that, Inkwell holds a short-lived, DPoP-bound access token and refreshes it automatically, so you stay signed in without repeating the approval step.
Verification built in
Publications and documents on Standard.site can claim a canonical
web address, but a claim on its own isn't proof. Inkwell checks it:
it fetches the publication's .well-known endpoint and
compares it against the record, and it looks for a matching
canonical <link> tag on the published page. This
catches the case where a document or publication record points at
a site it doesn't actually control — a spoofed or stale .well-known response, or a canonical link that doesn't
match — and surfaces that mismatch to you rather than silently
treating every claimed link as trustworthy.
Accessibility & appearance
Text size, bold text, an increase-contrast mode that snaps foreground to pure black or white against the current background, and underlined links are all free, unconditional settings — never gated behind anything. A separate accent colour, reading font, and appearance override let you make the reading surface your own. Inkwell has no ads, no paywalls, and no premium tier; a single dismissible prompt towards Ko-fi appears once, the first time you change a setting, and never again after that.
Users already using Inkwell
Inkwell users across the network. This carousel is generated from
Constellation backlinks to the uk.ewancroft.inkwell.user lexicon record, resolving DIDs to Bluesky avatars and handle aliases via
Slingshot.
Where iOS and Android differ
iOS is Inkwell's primary implementation and gets new features first. The Android app is still labelled experimental, but it has closed most of the gap: reading, discovery, writing across every Standard.site format, comments, verification, and background notifications are all implemented and usable today.
Get Inkwell for either platform