A Medium desktop app: reading and drafting in one window

Searching for a Medium desktop app returns a mix of results that never quite resolves: a help page that links only to the App Store and Google Play, a couple of Medium posts announcing third-party writing apps, a catalog site offering a wrapped version, and a Reddit thread where people ask the same question again. The short answer is that no official desktop build exists, and nothing Medium publishes points to one. The longer answer is more useful, because the reason it does not exist also explains why the browser version is the strongest version, and why the thing worth fixing is the window rather than the software.

What Medium actually publishes

The help center page titled Download Medium apps is short enough to read in one pass. It offers two destinations, the App Store and the Google Play Store, and then explains how to sign in once the app is open. There is no third link.

The App Store listing confirms the shape of it. The app is published by A Medium Corporation under the name Medium: Read & Write Stories, filed under News, free with in-app purchases, and 252.3 MB. The supported devices are iPhone and iPad. Mac does not appear, which means the developer has not opted in to letting the iPhone build install on Apple silicon Macs. On the US storefront the listing shows a 4.8 average across roughly 157,000 ratings and an age rating of 13+. The listed language is English only.

That last detail about Mac compatibility is the one that closes off a route some people expect. Plenty of publishers leave the Mac checkbox on, and their iPhone apps then install from the Mac App Store into the Applications folder. Medium has not, so searching the Mac App Store for Medium returns unrelated apps from other developers rather than a first-party build.

The app description does mention the desktop, in the line about a continuous reading experience across iPhone, iPad and desktop. What it means by desktop is the website. Reading position, library, lists and drafts sync through the account, not through a downloaded program.

What supported means on the desktop

Medium does publish a specific statement about desktop support, and it is more precise than most platforms bother to be.

Full Medium experience is supported on Windows and macOS for the two most recent versions of the following desktop browsers: Safari, Google Chrome, Firefox, Microsoft Edge. Source: help.medium.com

The same page names what full means: logging in, composing and editing stories, interacting through notes, and using all the other Medium features. Readers on other browsers or older versions should still be able to read articles, with a recommendation to move to a current version of one of the four.

Two things follow from that sentence. The first is that there is no second-class desktop tier. The browser version is the reference implementation, not a fallback for people who did not install something. The second is that browser choice matters more than it looks, because the four supported engines behave differently once a page is pulled out of the browser and given its own window, which is where this article ends up.

The version requirement is worth noting for anyone running an older machine. Two most recent versions is a moving target, and a browser that has stopped updating because macOS has stopped updating will eventually fall outside it. Reading keeps working. Composing is the part that stops being guaranteed.

The desktop does some things the phone apps cannot

The interesting part of Medium's documentation is where the web and app instructions diverge. The help page on using the story editor splits every feature into a Web tab and an App tab, and several formatting tools appear only under Web.

Emoji entered by typing a colon followed by the emoji name is documented under Web. Superscript, which Medium supports for numbers, is documented under Web. Drop caps, the enlarged opening letter, is documented under Web. TK reminders, the publishing convention for marking a spot where information is still to come, is documented under Web. So is the word count that appears in the top left corner when text is selected.

The basics are on both sides. Bold, italics, links, headers and subheaders, quote blocks, and bulleted and numbered lists all carry App instructions as well, as do images, embeds and code blocks through their own help pages. The gap is concentrated in the finishing pass, the stage where a draft is tightened rather than written, and that stage is the one most writers do at a desk.

The traffic runs the other way too. Downloading a list of stories for offline reading is documented as an iOS and Android feature, so a browser cannot do it. Audio playback works on the website and on the mobile apps, and it is a member feature. Membership itself comes in two tiers, and the help center states both prices: Medium Member at $5 per month or $50 per year, and Friend of Medium at $15 per month or $150 per year. The second tier generates four times more earnings for the writers whose member only stories are read, and lets the member create Friend Links that let other people past the paywall.

Put together, the division is clean. Writing and long reading sessions belong on the desktop. Reading on a train belongs on the phone. That is a reasonable split, and it means the desktop problem is not a missing feature.

The third-party desktop apps, and what they are

Search results for this query include a few desktop apps that are not from Medium. Some are independent writing tools that publish to Medium through its API. Others are wrappers, which take medium.com and put it inside a window of its own.

The distinction matters when choosing. An independent writing tool has its own editor, which means its feature set is its own and may not match what the Medium editor does. A wrapper shows the real site, so anything the site can do, the window can do, including the Web-only formatting tools listed above.

Wrappers also differ from each other in one respect that shows up later rather than immediately: whether they ship their own copy of a browser engine or reference the browser already installed on the machine. A copied engine has to be updated by whoever made the wrapper. A referenced engine updates when the browser updates. For a site where the documented support policy is written in terms of the two most recent browser versions, that difference decides whether the window stays inside the supported set.

Pricing across this category runs from free to one-time purchases to monthly subscriptions. It is worth checking which of the three a given tool uses before installing it, because a window around a website is a thing most people keep for years.

The routes, side by side

Route	What it shows	Requirement	Session
medium.com in a browser tab	The full site	A current supported browser	Shared with every other tab in that profile
Safari Add to Dock	The full site	macOS Sonoma 14 or later	Separate from Safari, no Chrome extensions
A Chromium browser's install as app option	The full site	That browser on macOS	Inherits the profile it was created from
A site to app tool	The full site	A current macOS	Its own profile per app
iPhone or Android app	The mobile layout	iOS or Android device	The device account
Third-party writing app	Its own editor	Varies	Its own account connection

The middle three rows all produce the same visible result, a window containing medium.com and nothing else, and they differ in what happens to extensions and sessions. Safari's route is documented by Apple, needs macOS Sonoma 14 or later, and is reached through File and then Add to Dock.

The web app is saved to the Applications folder of your home folder, and you can also open it from the Dock or Spotlight. Source: support.apple.com

Apple's documentation adds that such a window keeps its history, cookies, website data and settings separate from Safari, that the name, icon and opening address can be changed, and that Safari extensions can be switched on or off per window. A window made this way is not a place Chrome extensions can run.

The install as app option in a Chromium based browser produces a comparable window, with one difference that shows up on the first launch: it inherits the browser profile it was created from, so a window made inside a work profile opens signed in to the work account.

A site to app tool sits in the same category and differs by giving each generated app its own profile, which is the part that matters for anyone running more than one Medium account or keeping personal reading out of a work browser.

What a dedicated window changes

Three differences show up in the first day of using one.

It has an address in the system

A tab has to be located before it can be used. A window appears in the Dock, shows up in Command+Tab as its own entry, and can be assigned to a Space or bound to a shortcut. For a page opened ten times a day, the saving is not the click, it is not having to look for it.

Reading and drafting stop competing

Medium is two products in one site. The homepage is built to pull attention outward toward recommended stories, and the editor is built to hold attention on one page. Keeping both in the same strip of tabs guarantees the wrong one gets opened. Two windows, one pointed at the drafts list and one pointed at the homepage, turn the act of opening into a statement of intent.

Sessions stay where they are put

A browser profile holds one signed-in session per site. Writers who publish under a personal account and also edit a publication under a different one spend real time signing in and out. Separate windows with separate profiles hold both at once. The same mechanism keeps a personal reading habit out of a browser that is signed in to a work account, which matters during screen sharing more than people expect.

Which page the window should open to

The default is the homepage, and the homepage is rarely the reason anyone opens Medium ten times a day. The address bar is the configuration.

For a writing window, the drafts list is the right target, because it turns an unfinished piece into something visible rather than something remembered. For a reading window, the library or a specific list is usually better than the homepage feed. For anyone in the Partner Program, the stats page is a third distinct job and does not belong in either of the other two windows.

The method is the same in every tool: sign in, navigate to the page, copy the address, use it as the app's start URL. Presets for common sites are listed on the Supported services page, and any other address can be entered directly. The Guide covers the per-window settings, including which browser engine an app points at and whether extensions are enabled inside it.

What to change first

Make one window, not three, and point it at the drafts list rather than the homepage, because that is the page whose absence from view costs the most. Give it a week before deciding whether reading deserves a window of its own, and check what a window costs on the pricing page before building a second one. If the finishing tools in the Medium editor are part of the routine, keep the window on a Chromium engine so the extensions used alongside them keep working, which Kagemusha handles per app.