WayWayBack

A free, open-source Wayback Machine app for Android, Linux, Windows and macOS.

Search for a site, then walk its Internet Archive history on a heat-map calendar — year → month → day — and open any snapshot in your browser.

Website & demo videos · Download · Report an issue

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Features

Every feature has a short demo video on the website.

Year → month → day calendar	Every day cell shows its capture count on a heat scale. Empty years, months and days are crossed out and never requested.
Fast by design	Uses the Wayback Machine's own sparkline and calendarcaptures endpoints, fetches only the selected year and caches locally.
Per-day snapshot list	Time and HTTP status for each capture, with hour / minute / second filters that only offer times that exist.
Smart search	Instant URL guesses plus optional keyless Wikipedia (article → homepage) and npm (package → repository) lookups; recent searches are remembered.
Stars & history	Star sites and snapshots; keep a local history of every link and capture you opened.
Share to open	Share a URL into WayWayBack from any app, or use wwb://open?url=… deep links.
Themes & layout	Light / dark / system, drag-to-reorder home tabs.
Private	No account, no backend, no tracking, no ads. Everything stays on your device.

Screenshots

Install

• Android: grab an APK from the latest release (arm64-v8a for most phones; universal works anywhere).
• F-Droid: the build.py reproducible build and metadata/ are ready; an inclusion request is planned.
• Desktop: download the archive for your OS from the release, or build from source (below).
  • Linux: extract and run ./wwb (needs GTK 3).
  • Windows: extract and run wwb.exe.
  • macOS: the .app is unsigned, so run xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine WayWayBack.app once, then open it.

Build from source

Requires the Flutter SDK (pinned to 3.41.9 in .fvmrc).

flutter pub get
dart run build_runner build      # generates the drift database code
flutter run -d android           # or: linux / windows / macos

Reproducible APK

The release APK is built by build.py, which pins the Flutter version and builds at a fixed path so the output is byte-for-byte identical on CI, in Docker and on the F-Droid server:

docker build -t wwb-build .
docker run --rm -v "$PWD":/tmp/app wwb-build /tmp/app/build.py   # -> app.apk

To sign it, drop a keystore next to android/app/ and create android/key.properties (both git-ignored):

storeFile=your-keystore.jks
storePassword=…
keyAlias=…
keyPassword=…

Without a key the build is debug-signed — fine for local use, and F-Droid strips the signature when it verifies reproducibility anyway.

GitHub Actions secrets

The release workflow signs and publishes the APK only when these repository secrets are set (Settings → Secrets and variables → Actions):

Secret	Value
KEYSTORE_BASE64	the keystore file, base64-encoded: base64 -w0 your-keystore.jks
KEYSTORE_PASSWORD	store password
KEY_ALIAS	key alias
KEY_PASSWORD	key password

If they are absent the workflow still runs as a reproducibility check but skips publishing, and the maintainer uploads a locally-signed APK to the release instead. Keep the same keystore forever — F-Droid pins its fingerprint in metadata/ (AllowedAPKSigningKeys).

How it works

lib/
  app.dart · main.dart          MaterialApp, theme, deep-link routing
  core/                         http client, favicon, theme, deep links, helpers
  data/
    wayback/wb_calendar.dart    __wb sparkline + calendarcaptures endpoints
    search/*                    URL guesser, Wikipedia, npm
    local/                      drift (SQLite) — sites, snapshots, settings,
                                history + tab order, TTL cache
  features/
    home/ search/ settings/ about/ day/
    link/                       link_controller.dart + scroll_selector,
                                month_calendar, request_details_dialog

Layers stay separated: data → state (Riverpod) → UI.

Legal

WayWayBack is an independent, unofficial client. It is not the Wayback Machine and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Internet Archive. It has no backend of its own — it talks directly to the public web.archive.org endpoints and stores all data locally on your device. All archived content, trademarks and service marks belong to their respective owners.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. This program comes with absolutely no warranty.