Hermit: A Web App Wrapper for Android

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One feature I really like about the Chromium-based Browsers (Google Chrome, Chromium/Iron, Microsoft Edge, Brave; haven’t found it in Opera) is the possibility to save a website as a shortcut. All four of these browses save these shortcuts in a folder in the “All Programs” menu (“Brave Apps”, “Chrome Apps”, “Chromium Apps”, from where they can be pinned to the taskbar, to the Windows 10/11 start menu, or to whichever “classic” startmenu you are using.

One can customize these shortcuts by adding the commandline option “–profile-directory=xxxxx”, then they will start a separate browser profile for saving all sorts of browsing data (cookies, passwords, etc).

I find this a very useful feature, but unfortunately the Android versions of these same browsers do not support this feature. I have tried a number of different apps which promised to provide this feature; the one which worked best was called “Anker”, but unfortunately the developer stopped maintaining it and thus it no longer works as of Android 10.

Now I have come across another app, called “Hermit”, available in the Play Store, which works even better than Anker. Among other features it permits one to backup all the defined web apps to a file, which one can then restore on a different device, thus avoiding the need to separately set up one’s favorite web apps on each device.

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