1-tap save of icon for web app to iphone

Hi I’ve been working on quite a few projects where in the prototype stage we are building responsive web apps and having people test on their i-phones.

I know you can manually save the site as an icon on your phone but is there any way to add a button to the web app that would automate this?

Obviously you can publish an app via cordova and ionic but really what we need is just for users to save an icon to their phone (much of the time we’ve found the real reason people want to grab apps through the app store is not necessarily because it’s “native” but because they don’t want to have to remember & type the URL into a browser).

Does anyone have anything like this? It would be massively useful especially in the early validation stages.

Thanks,

Chaz

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Another problem with home screen website links though, is that they open in Safari - this means you can’t use the native multi-tasking functionality in iOS to switch between apps, you have to start dealing with Safari tabs, which is a huge hassle.

Don’t have an answer to your question, just bringing up another advantage of the native container.

Android has the ability to prompt users to add a web app to the home screen, but iOS support for the same seems to be lacking. If you are really interested in getting closer to the native experience on iOS for your webapp, there is a good read here.

But, as @sashko pointed out, there are definite benefits to having native versions of your app. I’m eager to live in the world where there is really only one code base and web apps are truly supported, but it hasn’t happened yet.

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Totally. I’m just talking about doing this to make it easier to test and validate not as “production”.

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Ah, awesome. I’ll give this a shot. Thanks!

For me ‘apple-mobile-web-app-capable’ works about twice slower than when working with browser directly. Basically responses on clicks are slower, whereas scrolls work fine. Any ideas how to improve?