Zero to a full EinkBro App on iOS in three days

This week the EinkBro iOS port went from an empty repository to a working WKWebView browser with near-complete feature parity with the Android original — 57 commits and 53,470 lines between Thursday morning and Saturday, built with Compose Multiplatform and Kotlin.

Thursday — the port, then a real browser by nightfall

The day opened with the initial port fa15096: the entire EinkBro Compose UI — 258 files, ~24,000 lines — compiling and running on iOS via Compose Multiplatform, first as a UI catalog of every ported screen and dialog. Tiny source-compatible android.*/androidx.* shims let the original Android files compile unchanged, keeping the package layout diffable against the Android tree.

An eight-phase migration plan was adopted — and all eight phases shipped the same day:

• Phase 1–2: real WKWebView browser shell; NSUserDefaults-backed preferences and a Room KMP database.
• Phase 3: the content pipeline — reader mode, vertical CJK reading, CSS injection slots (~5,000 lines).
• Phase 4: privacy & blocking — adblock via content rule lists, incognito, per-site configs, UA switching, clear-data.
• Phase 5–6: text-selection highlights and link context menus; then the services layer — translation, read-aloud TTS, GPT summarize.
• Phase 7–8: save-as-PDF and offline web archives; the einkbro:// scheme, .webarchive opening, iPad layout, app icon.
• Plus a cleanup refactor moving all injected JavaScript out of Kotlin strings into .js asset files.

Friday — the feature-parity marathon, Phases A–N

With the browser working, Friday was a systematic sweep through fourteen parity phases, each one mapped against specific Android files and line references:

• Foundation (A–C): a central BrowserAction dispatcher mirroring Android's toolbar/menu handlers, a much deeper WKWebView engine delegate, and a sweep making core settings actually take effect.
• Interaction (D–G): fullscreen, keep-awake, and pull-to-refresh; find on page; touch-area paging zones, the gesture FAB, and multitouch gestures; split screen with a second web pane, open-link-here, and scroll sync.
• Power features (H–J): a real GM_* userscript runtime with Room storage and a script manager; pure-Kotlin EPUB export with chapters, images, and append-to-book; app-data backup, bookmark import, and Instapaper.
• Services (K–M): AI chat-with-web with query persistence and GPT prompt editors; OpenAI and Edge neural TTS engines; translation via the Google widget, per-site auto-translate, image OCR, and dual captions.
• Settings (N): enum pickers, sub-editors, privacy enforcement, and the toolbar layout editor.

The phases were followed by same-day audit rounds: favicons and a live tab bar, URL-bar search suggestions, a hide/reorder menu editor, removal of the system edit menu in favor of the custom selection menu, and a 4,400-line settings batch (locale picker, PDF paper size, auto-hide toolbar, vertical toolbar, reader settings, zoom reflow, external-link consent).

Saturday — audit-driven gap closing and polish

Saturday started with FEATURE_GAPS.md 47ae073, a four-domain audit of what still differed from Android — then an overnight session closed most of it:

• AI: the task runner went live — built-in tasks plus a free-form agent 4bd7046 — and chat-with-web and agent tasks moved into native chat tabs d0dd4db; fixes for agent page snapshots, a translation flash, and a task-menu crash.
• Media & reading: background TTS audio with lock-screen and Control Center transport controls; dark mode in reader mode.
• Engine fidelity: an offline error page with retry, pinch-to-zoom restored alongside a real load-progress bar, x.com no longer escaping to Safari (with a reload-loop guard), and CJK search queries no longer arriving as mojibake.
• Privacy & per-site: analytics fast-block, the DNT header, FastToggle whitelist editors, and per-site desktop viewport width.
• Data portability: Chrome/Netscape bookmark HTML import with nested folders, per-site domain configs in the backup ZIP, and highlights export.
• Theming: the dark-mode primary color was black-on-black; that fix plus dark dialog headers, dialog borders, the root cause of input dialogs dismissing on focus, and edge-to-edge bottom content.

Under the hood

The app is a single shared Kotlin module consumed by a thin SwiftUI host. All UI, ViewModels, the preference layer, the Room KMP database, and Ktor networking live in commonMain; the platform seam is a set of expect/actual interfaces — most importantly WebViewEngine, whose iOS actual wraps WKWebView with user scripts and JS message handlers. TTS rides on AVFoundation, adblock on WKContentRuleList, preferences on NSUserDefaults.

Two decisions did a lot of quiet work this week: keeping the original Android package layout so every file diffs cleanly against its Android counterpart, and treating the Android app as the behavioral reference — features were ported by reading the original implementation first, not re-imagined. With no test suite, the loop was a fast Kotlin compile check plus driving each feature in the iOS simulator.