FoldRender is a native Android Markdown renderer. This page is the whole procedure — install, open or clone, read — with the actual buttons you will tap, the file tree behaviour to expect on a big repo, and the places the app stops. Markdown rendering is one of the four formats verified end to end on a clean device.
FoldRender is on the Play Store as FoldRender: Git Repo Reader, package id dev.foldrender.app, free and distributed worldwide. Install it the ordinary way — no allow installs from this source prompt to approve, and updates arrive on their own. The app declares minSdk 30, so it needs Android 11 or newer; Play will tell you if a device is below that rather than letting you install a build that cannot run.
Opened cold, FoldRender shows two buttons: Open a file and Open a folder, under the line “Open a file, or point the app at a folder and browse everything in it: markdown, source code, JSON, CSV, images, PDFs.” Open a file launches the system document picker for a single document. Open a folder launches the Android folder picker; the folder you grant becomes a persisted workspace that is still there after a restart.
Open the git panel: Git in the ⋮ menu, or the branch icon when the file tree fills the screen. Until you pick a repository its title reads Choose a repository, with No repository chosen under it. Then tap the title, type owner/repo or paste the GitHub address into Filter, or type owner/repo, tap Open owner/repo, then Get the code. A public repository clones anonymously. On 2 November 2026 two cloud phones did that with owner/repo typed in, no GitHub account and no token entered.
After a clone the app opens it as the workspace and starts listing files. On a large repository — on the order of 4,600 files — this takes a long time and shows nothing but a spinner: no percentage, no file counter, no estimate. It does finish. Treat the silence as slowness rather than a hang; this is a known rough edge, not a crash.
The left pane has three tabs: Files, Search and Shortcuts. In Files, every row carries a type badge — Markdown files are badged MD. Files your .gitignore hides are hidden here too; Show ignored files in the ⋮ above the file tree brings them back. Tap README.md and it renders in the right-hand pane when the device is unfolded, or full width when it is folded.
A small floating button sits in the bottom-right corner of a rendered Markdown document. It opens an outline sheet listing the document's top-level headings, with the heading you are currently inside emphasised; tap one to scroll there. Only top-level headings appear, because a heading nested inside a blockquote has no scroll target of its own. A document with no headings gets “No headings in this document.”
The magnifier in the top bar opens a find bar with the placeholder Find in document…. It shows a live current/total match counter and up/down chevrons to step through hits. The magnifier only appears for formats that support find — Markdown, notebooks, JSON/YAML/TOML, CSV, source, logs, plain text, HTML, Word and Excel files, and PDFs on Android 15 or newer. Images, diagrams and archives have no find bar.
The text-size icon opens the Reading sheet: a Theme segmented control (System / Light / Dark), a Text size slider from 80% to 160%, a Line width slider from 480 dp to 1200 dp, and a Serif body text switch. Line width is what matters on an unfolded Fold — it stops paragraphs running the full width of the inner screen. The settings persist, and changing the theme re-renders without re-parsing the document.
Export or share in the ⋮ menu opens the Export sheet: Print / Save as PDF, which opens the system print sheet where you pick “Save as PDF”; Share as HTML, one self-contained file with fonts, math, diagrams and images inlined as data URIs; Share as PNG, the whole page as one tall image; and Share the original file, the file exactly as it is.
CommonMark plus GitHub-flavored Markdown — tables with column alignment, strikethrough, task lists, autolinks — and YAML front matter, which renders as a metadata header rather than a wall of quoted text. On top of that: GitHub/Obsidian callouts written as > [!WARNING], [[wiki links]], footnotes numbered by first reference, and enough MDX tolerance that import/export lines and bare JSX components degrade to nothing instead of leaking source into the page.
commonmark-java parses the document into a block list that feeds a Compose LazyColumn, so only the blocks on screen are composed. Text selection is Compose's, not the browser's. The parsers emit no colours and no Compose types, which is why switching theme re-renders without re-parsing.
Fenced code blocks get a language label and a Copy code button. ```mermaid fences and $…$ / $$…$$ math render in a sandboxed island whose WebView has blockNetworkLoads set and whose client refuses any URL outside the bundled assets — mermaid and KaTeX, fonts included, ship inside the APK. Tap a diagram for a full-screen, pinch-zoomable view.
The honest list — shipped-but-unverified behaviour included, so you can tell before installing whether this build does the thing you came for.
configChanges for orientation, screen size, screen layout, smallest width, keyboard, density and UI mode, so folding does not recreate the activity — that is true by construction and has been exercised in an emulator. We have not measured fold/unfold on retail Fold hardware and make no smoothness claim about it.Four apps people actually reach for, and the one axis that separates them: whether the repository ends up on the phone, and whether anything renders it once it is there.
| Tool | Download price | Where you get it | Clones to the device | Renders PDF / notebook / Markdown | Editor or shell |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FoldRender | US$0 | Google Play, worldwide | Yes — HTTPS, anonymous for public repos | Yes — native Compose renderers | A plain-text editor for files in a clone; no shell |
| GitHub Mobile | US$0 | Google Play and the App Store | No — it reads repositories hosted on GitHub | Only what GitHub itself renders, online | Edits files inside a pull request |
| Termux + git | US$0 | F-Droid or GitHub | Yes — the real git CLI | No — terminal text only | Yes, a full shell and any CLI editor |
| MGit 1.7.0 (2023) | US$0 | F-Droid only | Yes — clone, pull, push, HTTPS or SSH keys | No | No — its own listing says it ships no text editor |
Prices are for the download. GitHub Mobile’s capabilities follow your GitHub plan; Termux and MGit are both free software. MGit’s version and date are from its F-Droid listing.
Every figure here is read out of the shipping build or off a primary source listed at the foot of this page — nothing is rounded up for effect.
minSdk 30 — the API level Android 11 shipped with in 2020 — compiled and targeted against API 36.The primary documents behind the figures above, so you can confirm any of them without taking our word for it.
git-clone reference — the operation Get the code performs, in the words of the project that defines itminSdk names as its floorPage last checked against the app's source on 2026-11-02; clean-device results on it are from an earlier pass, on an earlier build.