CORRECTIV app

A prototype community app for CORRECTIV members: the organisation's investigations, fact checks, Salon5 radio, CrowdNewsroom callouts, the Faktenforum and the membership club. This repository holds the app, the platform-free core it is built on, the design tokens they are drawn with, and the site that publishes all of it.

Start with the workbench

correctiv.github.io/correctiv-app is the front door, and the app is a link inside it. One site carries the repository's documentation, the inventory of what the app reads, the architecture diagrams, a reference generated from the core, and the running app in a device frame. It renders this repository's Markdown in place, keeps no copy of it, and is rebuilt on every push to main. Addresses worth going to directly:

/preview	The app itself in a phone or tablet frame, with an inspector for its state, its console, its palette and its layout. No install, no emulator.
/sources	What each part of the app reads: a live source, sample data standing in for an API that does not exist yet, or nothing at all.
/decisions	Every architecture record, and which of their claims a later one has made false.
/architecture	One core, its ports, and the article path end to end.

The screens work end to end and the backends behind them do not exist yet. Sign-in, the club join, the callouts and the Faktenforum claims run on typed sample data shaped like the responses that will replace it, which the app says on screen. Articles, the newsletter archive, search, Salon5 audio and video are live.

How this is built

The app is built by AI-assisted development, "vibe coding", with a human directing the work and deciding what lands. What keeps it honest is checkable. Every architectural choice is recorded in adr/, and a claim that a later decision made false is struck through where it stands, with a link to the record that voided it, instead of being quietly rewritten. Every source the app reads is inventoried in SOURCES.md, and a weekly job measures all of them against the live sources and opens a pull request with what moved, so the figures and the day they were taken are generated rather than typed. npm run check at the root runs typecheck, lint, format and tests in seconds, and TROUBLESHOOTING.md collects the defects that passed exactly that, which is why a green check is not treated as evidence here.

Getting started

Node 24, the current LTS. .nvmrc names it, so nvm use in this directory picks it up.

npm install
npm run check       # typecheck, lint, format, tests, in seconds, no device
npm run app         # the app in a browser, at localhost:8081/app/, Fast Refresh
npm run android     # a dev build on an emulator or a device
npm run build:web   # static export to apps/mobile/dist/

Only npm run android needs the Android toolchain, JDK 17 and an Android SDK with ANDROID_HOME set. iOS is maintained in code and has not been built.

The workbench and the app are two servers locally, and the site's dev server proxies the app under itself so that the frame and the app stay one origin:

npm run workbench   # the site, at localhost:5173
npm run app         # the app it frames, at localhost:8081/app/

The app's dev server carries the same /app base the deploy gives it, so the assets resolve the same way in both. Expo Router applies that base when the export is built and not in the dev server, so locally the frame reaches the app's first screen and a deeper route renders the app's own 404. TROUBLESHOOTING.md has the measurement and what to do instead.

The published demo reads live content and falls back to a snapshot committed in the repository, so it works without a network. npm run offline-articles and npm run offline-podcasts refresh that snapshot; run them and commit the result before you want the demo to show recent articles.

Where things live

• packages/app-core holds every piece of behaviour and imports no UI framework and no platform SDK.
• apps/mobile is the app, on Expo and React Native, for iOS, Android and web.
• apps/workbench is the published site, including /preview.
• packages/design-tokens and tokens/ are the colours, spacing and type scale, vendored from CORRECTIV's design tokens.
• packages/prose-and-code is the helpers the checks in here are written with: a walk that cannot pass on nothing, an excuse list that can only shrink, a number in a sentence held to what the code counts. Apache-2.0 and framework-free, so another project can take it.

ARCHITECTURE.md is how they fit together, AGENTS.md is how to work in here, and RELEASE.md is how a build reaches a device.

Licence

AGPL-3.0-or-later, see LICENSE, with one exception that has a LICENSE of its own: packages/prose-and-code is Apache-2.0, because it is meant to be taken by projects that cannot take AGPL (ADR 0043 §3). That is a rule about imports rather than a field in a manifest — nothing in that directory may import anything else in here — and packages/prose-and-code/test/licence-boundary.test.ts is the check under it. The MIT notice for the parts scaffolded by create-expo-app and for the bundled fonts is kept in apps/mobile/NOTICE.md; the design tokens are vendored from correctiv/wp-design-tokens (GPL-2.0-or-later). Sample content and images are CORRECTIV material, and nothing is on an app store.