What is an App?
An app is the thing you get. You describe what you want, PhiCo builds it, and what arrives is not a page but a working whole: its pages, the data those pages read and write, the sign-in its visitors use, and the look that ties them together — delivered at once, at its own address.
Everything else on this page is a part of an app. Read this one first and the rest of the vocabulary falls into place.
What an app is made of
| Part | What it does | Read more |
|---|---|---|
| Surfaces | The pages. Each one is a composition, not a hand-written document. | Surfaces |
| Blocks | The typed pieces a page is built from — headings, forms, tables, galleries. | Blocks |
| Capabilities | The powers a page declares when it needs to store, read, navigate or react. | Capabilities |
| Records | The data the app keeps — form entries, catalog items, anything its pages write. | Capabilities |
| Visitor sign-in | Who the app lets in, and by which method. | Visitor sign-in |
| Appearance | Theme, layout and tokens, held in one place rather than scattered per page. | Composition |
An app with one page is still an app: the data and the sign-in come with it whether or not you use them on day one.
Where an app lives
Apps live inside a World — your workspace. A World holds your apps, your team, your plan and your storage; an app never floats outside one.
One World normally holds several apps, and they do not share each other’s records: data belongs to the app that wrote it, not to the World at large. That separation is what lets a customer portal and an internal handbook sit side by side without leaking into one another.
See Understanding Worlds.
An app has an address
When you publish, the app claims a public slug and is served at its own address. The slug is claimed once and does not change when you republish — it is the app’s public identity, which is why links you have shared keep working and why sign-in redirects stay valid.
Publishing is not the only way out, and it is not the same thing as export:
- Publish — the app goes live at its address, served straight from storage. Team plans and above can point their own domain at it.
- Download the pwpack — the app’s full source in one package, yours to keep, on every plan.
- Export the pwapp — a ready-to-run bundle you can drop on any static host, on every plan.
- Publish to the marketplace — offer the app for others to install. This one is reviewed before it appears.
Closing an account does not take the app away: the pwpack you downloaded runs without us.
See Publishing your app.
How an app changes
An app is never edited by hand-patching a live page. PhiCo proposes a Receipt — a line-numbered account of what would change — and nothing ships until that Receipt is accepted. Every accepted Receipt is an immutable snapshot, so a revision can be compared and rolled back.
App, surface, site — which word when
| Say | When you mean |
|---|---|
| App | The whole thing a customer owns and publishes. |
| Surface | One page inside it — the unit the platform API addresses. |
| World | The workspace the apps live in. |
| Block | A typed piece inside a page. |
The docs use surface wherever the subject really is the page-level unit — schemas, renderers, revisions — because that is what the code calls it. When the subject is what a customer gets, the word is app.
Next
- Create your first app
- Surfaces — the page unit, in depth
- Publishing your app