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Ask HN: “Add to Home Screen” webapps

7 points| oyeanuj | 7 years ago

Has anyone here built or supported "Add to Home Screen" mobile-web apps? I'm curious to hear people's experiences, especially for apps that have logged-in experiences.

I've a site that uses passwordless magic links to log you in, and strangely there seems to be very little online about how well logged-in experiences work, and best practices to implement them.

3 comments

openthc|7 years ago

I've made a few of them; there are some tricks -- especially if you want them to stay authenticated. AddToHome trick will reference the page they are currently on, so I only allow it on the /home or /dashboard like pages -- if they add to home from a deep-link it will always land them there.

And there's like a dozen meta tags for the Apple/Android systems to get right.

It basically creates a hosted-web-view with less "chrome" around there -- no address bar and stuff like that -- so you'll need to solve the 'back-button' problem too.

oyeanuj|7 years ago

Could you share those tricks around staying authenticated? Since cookies aren't shared between regular browser and "HomeScreen" app, how do you make that happen?

atum47|7 years ago

I'm having some trouble with this right now. Just posted a second ago. I can't figure out the right way to cache your web app so chrome would prompt the user to install it.

If someone could help, take a look at my repo:

https://github.com/victorqribeiro/create