PressedMail on a Phone
How the phone shell works, what it drops from the desktop layout, and how to install PressedMail to a home screen.
wp-admin on a phone is usually a punishment. PressedMail sidesteps it with a separate shell: one screen at a time, a bottom tab bar, and gestures that behave the way a phone mail app behaves. This page covers when that shell appears, what it does, what it gives up, and how to put PressedMail on a home screen.
When the phone shell appears
PressedMail measures its own container, not the browser window, so the in-admin responsive preview works too. Three bands:
- Under 640px is a phone.
- 640px to 1023px is a tablet.
- 1024px and up is desktop.
Anything under 1024px gets the phone shell. There is one extra rule: a coarse pointer plus a window narrower than 640px also counts as a phone, because inside wp-admin the container can still measure wide on a real handset.
The shell hides the WordPress admin bar and side menu when it mounts, so mail gets the whole screen. The chevron in the screen header brings the WordPress chrome back, and your choice survives navigation.
The bottom tab bar
Inbox, Calendar, Contacts, More, with a round compose button floating in the middle of the bar. Calendar and Contacts are Pro features and are compiled out of the Free build, so Free shows two tabs: Inbox and More. Unread counts sit on the tab as a badge and stop counting at 99+.
More opens a sheet with Accounts, Folders, Settings, Add to Home Screen, and Help and Docs.
The bar gets out of the way on its own. Reading a message or writing one hides it until you come back.
Touch actions
- Swipe a message right to archive it, left to delete it. Either takes 80px of travel, so a scroll never triggers it by accident.
- Long-press a message to enter bulk select. A bottom action bar replaces the tab bar with the actions for the selection.
- Pull down to refresh. It only arms when the list is already scrolled to the top, and the indicator follows your finger at about half speed.
- Drag in from the left edge to go back through the screens you opened. A composer with unsaved changes turns that gesture off rather than losing your draft.
- Every button, tab and row is at least 44px in both directions.
- A Skip to content link is the first focusable item on every screen.
What the phone drops
The phone shell is not the desktop layout squeezed down. It swaps the resizable multi-pane view for a single routed column, so the reading pane, the panel splitters and the layout-specific headers are not there. The desktop status bar with its sync and folder counters goes too. Your theme, typeface and density settings still apply.
Installing it to a home screen
PressedMail serves its own web app manifest on its admin screens, scoped to the plugin page and set to open standalone. Go to More, then Add to Home Screen.
- If your browser offers an install prompt, the Install button on that screen triggers it.
- If not, the same screen carries the steps for Safari on iPhone (Share, then Add to Home Screen) and Chrome on Android (browser menu, then Install app).
- The manifest registers a
mailtoprotocol handler, and the same screen has a button that asks the browser to routemailto:links to PressedMail. Browser support for this varies. - It also declares a share target, so sharing a link or a block of text from another app opens a new message with it.
One honest limit: a web app running inside WordPress cannot become the operating system's default mail client the way a native app can. Supported browsers will hand it mailto: links, and that is as far as the web platform goes.
The manifest takes its name, icons and theme colour from your branding settings, so a white-labelled install shows your name on the home screen.