Android
The same small, warm place for photographs — installed on your phone, where the camera already is. Sparks, flickers and sealed whispers all work better with one.
Checking your device
The build lives behind the door rather than in front of it: sign in to Lantern and it is waiting in your settings. If you have not been handed an invite link yet, there is nothing here for you to install.
Lantern is not on the Play Store, so your phone will ask once whether it trusts the file. That prompt is Android doing its job — here is what it means and what to tap.
Open Lantern on the phone itself, not on a laptop, and go to Settings. The download is there; the file lands in your Downloads folder.
Android will say it blocked an app from an unknown source. Tap Settings on that prompt, turn on Allow from this source for your browser, then go back and tap Install.
Optional, and worth doing. Once Lantern is installed, revoke Allow from this source again. Nothing you installed stops working, and the next surprise APK gets stopped.
Lantern is invite-only. An app that anyone can install, pointed at a server that nobody can join, is a confusing thing to hand a stranger — so the two now agree with each other: if you can get in, you can have the app.
It also means the build is served by the same machine that holds your photos, rather than copied onto a third party's network. Its size and checksum are shown next to the download once you are signed in, read from the file itself at that moment.
A store listing needs a company identity, a privacy review and a content rating, and it hands Google a say in an app whose entire argument is that very few parties get a say. This is a testing build going to people who were handed an invite by someone they know. A direct download is the honest shape for that.
There is no store to push them, so the app asks the server what the current build is. When one is genuinely required it will say so and send you back here; otherwise it stays out of your way.
Not yet. Apple requires a paid developer account and a review pass for every build, which is a different sort of commitment. Lantern works in the browser on iOS in the meantime — open it there.
This is version 1.0 of something being tried out, running on one small computer on a shelf. Accounts are capped at four posts, videos at thirty seconds, and the server is not awake around the clock. Treat it as a place to play rather than the only copy of anything you care about.