The offline reserve
The app keeps a rolling store of recent posts on the phone so that opening it with no signal shows a feed rather than an error. This is called the reserve.
What is saved
Posts. The text of a post, its author, its counts and the network it came from, written as a file in the app’s own Application Support directory. Nothing about the reserve leaves the phone.
Pictures, when they survive. Images are held in the app’s image cache on disk, which is shared with normal scrolling and is transient: iOS may clear it when the device is short of storage. A reserve entry is therefore guaranteed its text and not its picture, and a text-only entry is still kept, because text is what stops the reserve reaching zero.
Never video. Video files are large and a reserve of text and pictures is what fits in a phone’s spare space. Video is never cached.
Never adult material. The same check that keeps adult content out of the feed runs before an entry is written to disk, and runs again over anything an earlier version of the app left in the file, so an update scrubs the store rather than trusting it.
The size setting
Settings, Saved posts, offers four values:
| Setting | Posts held |
|---|---|
| Off | none |
| 200 | 200 |
| 1,000 | 1,000 |
| 5,000 | 5,000 |
The default is 200. The setting screen shows how many posts are currently held and how much space the reserve and its pictures are using.
How it fills and empties
The reserve is filled on every successful load of the main feed, including a refresh the system runs in the background: posts that pass every filter are appended as they are ranked. There is no separate download step and no wi-fi-only restriction. Reading from the reserve never removes anything from it — entries are rotated, so a post that has never been served is offered before one that has, and the least recently served comes next.
Entries leave the store in three ways only: they expire after a week, they are pushed out when the store is at its size limit, or they are removed because a moderation setting, a block or a mute now excludes them.
The moderation rules are re-applied to the stored entries every time the feed loads, so a block, a mute or a change of setting takes effect on the reserve as well as on the live feed.
There is no separate clear button: setting the size to Off empties the reserve and deletes the file. Deleting the app removes it along with everything else.
What it looks like in use
When the app is showing reserve content rather than a live fetch, it says so on the screen: a line reading that it is offline and showing saved posts, and, once the reserve has been read through, that there is nothing further. A post from earlier in the day behind a line that admits it is offline is more useful than an empty screen, and the app does not pretend the content is live.
The Saved posts screen shows how many posts are held and how much space they and their pictures are using.
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