The Goodreads desktop site as a Mac app: shelves in one window

Searches for the Goodreads desktop site tend to come from one of three situations. Someone on a phone found the mobile layout missing a feature and went looking for the full one. Someone on a Mac ended up on the mobile layout and cannot find the way back. Or someone already on the desktop site every day has started to resent the fact that it lives in a browser tab alongside everything else.

The first two have documented answers. The third one does not, because Goodreads does not publish a desktop application, and the desktop site is the whole product on a Mac. What follows separates the three problems and says what can actually be changed.

What the desktop site is, and where the switch lives

Goodreads serves two layouts of the same site. The narrow one is what a phone browser gets by default. The wide one is the layout that has the left hand navigation, the full shelf tools and the site's older feature set intact.

The switch between them is a link in the footer. Goodreads' own help answers place it at the bottom of most pages, naming the profile page and the home page, and they are explicit that it is not on every page. The book page is the exception, and it is deliberate. Goodreads states that the Desktop version and Mobile version toggle normally sitting under the copyright notice has been removed from the redesigned book page, because that page now serves a single version regardless of the device it is opened on. Anyone who lands on a book page first and scrolls the footer looking for the link is searching for something that is no longer there. Going to the profile page or the home page first is what makes the toggle appear.

When the footer link is not available, the fallback is the browser rather than the site. Goodreads' help points Chrome users at the three dot menu and the Request desktop site option. That instruction is written for a phone, and it matters on a Mac only in one narrow case, which is a Mac browser window that has been left narrow enough or a stored preference that keeps serving the mobile layout.

On a Mac the wide layout is normally what loads, so the reader whose Mac shows the mobile site is usually looking at a stale preference rather than a bug. Switching once from the home page footer is generally the end of it.

What only the desktop site can do

The gap between the layouts and the gap between the site and the phone app are not the same gap, and the second one is wider.

The clearest example is the library itself. Exporting a Goodreads library is a desktop site operation: My Books, then Import and export under the Tools list on the left, then Export Library under Export. Goodreads notes the file can take a few minutes to generate on a large library, and that when it is ready a dated link appears to download the .csv. Importing runs from the same page and accepts .csv, .txt and .xls files, with the advice to split anything large into files of fewer than 500 books each.

That single page is the reason a lot of people go looking for the desktop site in the first place. A reading history is years of work, and the only route to a copy of it runs through a wide browser window.

The same pattern holds across the older parts of the site. Bulk shelf editing, the group and discussion machinery, Listopia, the reading challenge history and the account level settings are all built as pages rather than as screens in an app. None of it was rebuilt for a phone, which is why so many threads about missing features end with the advice to open a browser in desktop mode instead of using the app.

For a Mac reader the practical reading of that is simple. There is nothing to choose between. The desktop site is not a degraded fallback on a Mac, it is the complete version, and the only open question is what kind of window it should live in.

There is no Goodreads application for macOS

This is worth stating plainly because the search results make it look otherwise. Directory sites list Goodreads under headings like Desktop and Mobile App, and a Mac user reading those pages can reasonably conclude that an official download exists somewhere.

The App Store listing settles it. The app is published as Goodreads: Book Tracker & More by Goodreads, Inc, it is free, 97.5 MB, and its compatibility section lists iPhone requiring iOS 15.0 or later, iPad requiring iPadOS 15.0 or later, and iPod touch. There is no Mac entry in that list. An iPhone or iPad app appears on the Mac App Store on an Apple silicon Mac only when its developer has made it available there, and Goodreads has not. The listing also shows English as the only language, and an age rating of 13+ for advertising and user generated content.

The mechanism behind that is worth knowing, because it explains why the answer will not change quietly. On an Apple silicon Mac the Mac App Store carries a separate iPhone and iPad Apps section, and an iOS app turns up there only when its developer has left it available for Mac. A Mac entry in the compatibility list is the visible sign that this has happened. Goodreads has no such entry, so an Apple silicon Mac cannot install the phone app either, and an Intel Mac never could.

Goodreads is free to use and carries the Amazon company mark in its footer. Its own description of the service covers tracking books read, being read and wanted, reviews from the community, and a recommendation engine it describes as analysing 20 billion data points.

So the reader who wants Goodreads to behave like an application on a Mac is not waiting for a download. The question is whether the browser can be persuaded to give a website its own window, and it can.

Four ways to hold the desktop site open on a Mac

The routes differ less in what they show than in what the Mac does with them afterwards.

Route	Own Dock icon	Own Command Tab entry	Signed in session	Extensions
Browser tab	No	No	Shared with the browser	All of the browser's
Safari, Add to Dock	Yes	Yes	Separate from Safari	Safari extensions, per app
Chrome shortcut	Yes	Yes	The Chrome profile's	The profile's extensions
Site to app tool	Yes	Yes	Separate per app	Kept, per app

Safari's route is built in and documented. It requires macOS Sonoma 14 or later. In Safari, open the page, then choose File > Add to Dock from the menu bar, or use the Share button in the toolbar and choose Add to Dock, then type a name and click Add. The result is saved into the Applications folder of the home folder and opens from the Dock or from Spotlight. Deleting it is the same in reverse: open the home folder, open Applications, drag the app to the Trash.

Chrome's route lives under the More menu, in the Cast, save, and share submenu, as Create shortcut. It produces a launcher that opens in Chrome and inherits the profile it was created in, which means it inherits that profile's signed in accounts and extensions rather than getting its own.

A dedicated site to app tool sits in the same space as those two and differs mainly in giving each app its own signed in session while keeping browser extensions available, which is the combination neither built in route offers on its own. The list of sites people most often pull out of a tab strip gives a sense of which kind of page this shape suits.

The separate login nobody warns about

One line in Apple's documentation decides how the Safari route feels in practice. A Safari web app shares no browsing history, cookies, website data, or settings with Safari. Nothing carries across.

For Goodreads that means signing in again inside the new window, which on an Amazon owned service is the slower kind of sign in. It is a one time cost rather than a recurring one, and it is also the mechanism that makes two separate accounts possible in two separate windows, so whether it reads as a cost or a feature depends on the reader.

The rest of the web app behaviour is closer to an application than most people expect. Unread notification counts appear as a red badge on the Dock icon, provided the notification permission was granted inside the web app itself rather than in Safari. Installed Safari extension buttons are available, and each web app has an Extensions tab in its settings where they are enabled or disabled individually. The settings panel, reached by clicking the app name in the menu bar and choosing Settings, also renames the app, changes its URL, sets a custom icon, and controls whether the toolbar shows the back and forward buttons, the app name and the Share button.

That last control is the one worth setting deliberately for a site like this. Goodreads is a site people navigate through, following an author to a book to a list to a review, so hiding the back button makes the window harder to use rather than cleaner.

When a tab is still the right answer

Not every reading habit justifies a window of its own. The honest test is how a Goodreads session starts.

If it starts from somewhere else, from a newsletter link, a bookshop page, a recommendation in a chat, then a tab is correct. The site is a destination reached by following links, and pulling it out of the browser only means the links open in one window while the shelves live in another.

If it starts from Goodreads itself, opened deliberately, left open through the day, checked between other work, then it is behaving like an application and the four costs of being a tab start to apply. It shares one Command Tab entry with every other tab. Its page title carries whatever counts it has, and page titles truncate as a tab strip fills. It shares one signed in session per browser profile, so a second account needs a second profile. And it competes for attention with every other tab in the same strip, which is the cost that actually changes the reading habit.

There is a middle case, and it has a cheaper answer than either. A pinned tab keeps the site at the left edge of the strip, survives a window being closed and reopened, and costs nothing to undo. It fixes the position problem and none of the other three, which makes it the right first experiment for anyone unsure which pile Goodreads belongs in.

A useful way to decide is to count how many times Goodreads gets opened in a day and how it gets opened. Two visits from links is a tab. Ten deliberate visits is an application.

What to change first

Find the switch from the home page or profile footer rather than a book page, since that is where the toggle still exists. Then decide whether Goodreads is a destination or a habit, and if it is a habit, give it a window with Safari's Add to Dock or with Kagemusha and budget one sign in for it.