A few releases back I put Sprig in your pocket. Chervil Chat is a hosted, chat-only Chervil that runs in any phone's browser — you sign in at getchervil.com/chat and you're talking to the same assistant that powers the desktop app, grounded in live web search, wherever you are. No app store, no API key, nothing to set up.
It worked. But there was a gap I kept bumping into: to use it, I had to go find it. Open the browser, remember the URL or dig through bookmarks, wait for the page. On a phone, that's just enough friction to make you not bother — and "not bother" is where good tools go to die. The whole promise of "in your pocket" is that it's there, and a bookmark two taps deep isn't there.
So this release is about closing that last inch of distance. On Android, Sprig now lives on your home screen.
The widget
There's a new home-screen widget: a compact pill you drop right onto your home screen, next to your other apps. It has three controls, and each one is a shortcut past the part you don't want to do:
- The green Sprig chip opens a chat.
- The photo button jumps straight to a photo question — the picker opens for you, so you can ask "what is this?" about the thing in front of you in one tap.
- The voice button starts listening right away, so you can just talk.
That middle detail is the one I care about most. A launcher that only opens the app is fine, but the reason you reach for Sprig on your phone is usually specific: you want to show it something, or you want to talk because your hands are full. Making those first-class buttons — not menus you dig into after the app loads — is the difference between a shortcut and an actual habit. The widget doesn't open Chervil Chat and leave you at a blank prompt; it opens it already pointed at what you wanted to do.
An app, not just a page
The widget comes with a proper Chervil Chat app for Android. Under the hood it's a Trusted Web Activity — a thin native wrapper around getchervil.com/chat — which is a fancy way of saying it's the same web experience you already know, but installed like a real app: it opens full-screen, with no address bar and no browser chrome, and it lives in your app drawer and your home screen like anything else.
I want to be honest about what this is and isn't, because I try to be about all of it. It's still Chervil Chat — the same hosted, chat-only Sprig. It didn't grow tabs or composed pages or the everyday browser; that's still the desktop app, and deliberately so. What changed is purely how close it sits to your thumb. And for now this is an Android story specifically — the widget and the installable wrapper are Android features. On iPhone, Chervil Chat is still the excellent home-screen web app it's always been (Share → Add to Home Screen), and it opens full-screen there too.
Because it's Chervil Chat, it runs on Chervil's own managed AI and it's part of Pro. Nothing to configure, no key to bring — sign in and it works.
A clearer failure when your publish token stops working
The other change this release is smaller, but it fixed something genuinely confusing, and I only found the root cause because it happened to me.
Chervil Pro lets you publish pages to a getchervil.com link, authenticated by a publish token you paste into Settings once. Mine stopped working — publishing just failed — and my first assumption was that the app wasn't saving the token across updates. It turned out the token was saved perfectly. The real problem was on the other end: getchervil.com no longer recognized it, because a token can be regenerated on the website (or reset), and when that happens the copy in your app quietly becomes a dead key. Everything looks right — the token's sitting there in Settings — but every publish gets rejected.
The old error was a shrug: "couldn't publish." Now Chervil notices that specific case — a rejection that means this token is no longer valid, as opposed to a network hiccup or a hosting outage — and tells you exactly that, with one-tap actions to generate a fresh token at getchervil.com/me and jump to the right Settings panel. The account panel in Settings calls it out too, instead of a vague "couldn't verify your account." It's a small thing, but "the app told me precisely what was wrong and where to fix it" is most of what separates software you trust from software you fight.
Get it
Chervil Chat itself is live right now at getchervil.com/chat — sign in with your account and, on Android, add it to your home screen and drop the widget wherever you like. The publish-token fix ships in the 0.27.0 desktop build (Windows installer on the releases page, or keep running from source).
As always, this is alpha, and I'm building it in the open. If the widget saves you even a couple of taps a day, that's the whole point — the best tool is the one that's already there when you reach for it.