Playing on Your Phone

The Android app: what it is, where your games and the map live, and how it updates.

There is an Android app. It plays on its own — no PC to run alongside it, no server to set up, no Termux.

Installing

Download open-historia.apk (~21 MB) from the android release.

Android will warn you about installing from your browser rather than the Play Store. That is expected for an app distributed this way; allow it for your browser and continue.

What it is

The app is the same game openhistoria.com/play/ serves, packaged as an Android app. Your games and scenarios are saved on the phone, and the game logic runs there. The world map is not in the app: it streams from the community content nodes the website uses, so the app needs a connection to draw the map, and a blank map usually means no node was reachable — see troubleshooting.

Your AI provider requests go straight from the phone to the provider, the same as any other build.

The beta app carries the whole world. The beta channel's Android build, which has not yet replaced the APK on the release page, ships the world map inside it, trimmed to the zoom the map actually draws, so it plays in airplane mode from the first launch — only the Community Hub and your AI provider use the network. It can also export games and save the diagnostics log through Android's share sheet, and reach a model running on a PC on your own network (Ollama, LM Studio) without that model needing browser permissions.

Setting up AI

Same as everywhere else: the game menu, pick a provider, paste a key. See connecting an AI provider.

A cloud provider is the practical choice on a phone. Running a local model on the handset is not realistic. A model on a PC on the same network has to be entered by that PC's IP address rather than localhost, and on the stable app it must also accept requests from a browser page — the same restriction as the browser build.

Updating

The app checks the release for a newer build and offers it in a banner. Accepting downloads and installs it; your games are kept.

Playing on a small screen

The interface adapts, but a grand strategy map is a grand strategy map. Some honest expectations:

The map is the best part and works well with touch — pan, pinch, tap to select.
Reading diplomacy and events is comfortable.
The map editor is usable but fiddly. Author worlds on a desktop.
Long sessions are hard on the battery, because the map is a live 3D surface.

Turning off the 3D globe and 3D terrain, and switching on Reduce motion, all help noticeably. See settings.

iPhone and iPad

There is no iOS app. Open openhistoria.com/play/ in Safari and add it to your Home Screen for a fullscreen window.

Expect it to be slower than the Android app — the browser build streams its map rather than storing it, and the device is doing more work. It is playable, not ideal.

Connecting to a machine instead

If you would rather your phone be a window onto a game running on your PC, that works too: run the server on the PC and open its address on the phone. See hosting a server — including the warning about the API having no password.

Note that this is not two people playing together. It is one campaign, viewed from a different screen.

Install — the other platforms.
Hosting a server — pointing the phone at a PC.
Settings — what to turn off to save battery.

Open Historia is under active development on two channels, and this wiki is written by hand — a page can fall behind a release. Last checked against the game on 2026-09-24 · main e62a1c55 · beta 2f48a6c2. If something here does not match what you see in the game, trust the game and say so on Discord.