Link to mobile apps / revive welcome modal content

[ezwelty]

The legacy website shows various welcome modals to new visitors. The standard one is similar in content to the beta welcome page.

However, if a mobile device is detected, it points people to the mobile app. In 2025, this modal drove 21K clicks to the App Store and 17K clicks to Google Play. I realize the apps are not mentioned anywhere on the website. Should they be? If so, the web version of the welcome page seems like a natural place.

Finally there is a modal for the /grafter view and the /dumpster & /freegan view. These were not carried over, but these special entry points still get thousands of visitors per year. It could be worth thinking about if and where to place this content.

[wbazant]

Once I saw a 'Falling Fruit' app being recommended to a friend when they opened our site in mobile Chrome, and maybe the app stores would recommend the apps to users for some reason.

The straightforward solution is just links:

We could also have a modal later in the flow - a user who signed in on PWA mobile sees a modal about the app and how it's more or less the same but more pleasant, with a 'don't ask again' prompt.

[ezwelty]

@wbazant The links seem like a reasonable solution. I also thought of adding Google Play and App Store icons to our socials (which would work also on desktop) but that's probably too subtle.

For the other content, if/when we have the category filter (#608), they could popup when clicking on an "info" icon next to the "freegan" and "grafter" categories.

[wbazant]

Proposing to add it on the home page and account page.

We also have the project links and socials on the sign in page as per #989 but there's already a group of links there, also the page appears to have a double footer so removing the socials from the sign in page.

Also proposing to give up on https://guerrillagrafters.org - it was bought by spammers and is now linking to casinos and Russian shops.

Can you update the description in the stores to reflect the new user journey? There's no modal, so the app description is the first place where we can explain things to the user. Also we can now pitch the purchase as a fair exchange - there's a free mobile web app, but the app store version has small improvements to the same functionality due to being able to access native APIs.

[ezwelty]

Proposing to add it on the home page and account page.

Sounds good. I'll check your PR.

Also proposing to give up on https://guerrillagrafters.org/ - it was bought by spammers and is now linking to casinos and Russian shops.

Yikes! Fair enough.

Can you update the description in the stores to reflect the new user journey? ...

I created #1127. Feel free to add your ideas there.

There are still many people reporting dumpsters and I'm currently linking to https://old.fallingfruit.org/dumpsters to explain that we welcome dumpsters on Falling Fruit, since https://fallingfruit.org/dumpsters doesn't seem as explanatory. So the question remains – where to mention the dumpsters. Somehow I'd love to make use of our dumpster logo 😃 :

The honeybee logo was for the pollinator version of the map, for e.g. urban beekeepers, but that was never promoted heavily. A logo for the grafter category was never made, but I'm sure Konrad could make one to match the others if we wanted one per user-category