Tally: A hybrid Plausible wrapper not using Electron, built for Gnome

Tally is a simple and elegant native web view wrapper for the privacy respecting analytics platform, Plausible.io. In a sea of mostly electron based web app wrappers, it's nice to have a native webview based wrapper with some nice native features.

Native webview

and everything that comes with it

Using the native web view has a few advantages. The main advantage here is the use of the resources is very minimal. The native webkit web view uses roughly 50MB of RAM on the cold start of the app. It also allows for slick features like touchpad gestures for swiping back and forth between pages.

Some of you reading might thing webkit is not that great when compared to Chrome or Firefox. While that may be true, it does catch up with every update, but the more important point is that most of the features that Plausible offers, work within the app. I will go into what doesn't work in the next section.

All of the dropdown elements, detail popups, various tabs, and graphs work perfectly fine. On hover data of the graph, and maps functionality work as well. The app has the ability to switch between sites, and even the keyboard shortcuts work fine as well.

Everything Plausible offers

with some exceptions

The app also offers most of the features that plausible offers, including the ability to connect to a custom Plausible instance. The app also allows to update your Plausible account settings as well, all without ever leaving the app.

There are some exceptions to all the working features though. Any button or link that is supposed to download data, like button on the graph that allows you down CSVs of your data, or the links in your account setting that allow you to view your invoices, don't work. Other than that if you are going to setup 2FA using the app, then the copying the backup codes to your clipboard using the provided button will not work. This may be limitation of the app or the Flatpak sandbox it uses, I was able to use the button to copy the backup codes using Gnome Web.

To sum it up, Tally is a great application for those that like using dedicated applications on their desktop. It provides most of the usability features that Plausible has, and is only getting better. I already received an update while writing this that makes it look even more integrated into the Gnome desktop environment.