Make a site an app

Let visitors install one of your sites on their phone's home screen — a full-screen app with your icon, with nothing to publish.

What it is

Any site you host can be installed on a phone (Android or iPhone) or a desktop: it gets your icon on the home screen and opens full-screen, without the browser's bars. It is still your website — every change you make is live in the installed app straight away. Nothing goes through an app store.

Switching it on

Open Websites Manager › Make it an app with the site selected in the sites picker.

Name on the home screen — up to 12 characters (the site name, cut, if you leave it blank).
Opens on — the page the app starts on, for example /dashboard or /train.
Toolbar colour — the theme's main colour unless you set one.
Icon — a square PNG or JPEG, 512 × 512 is best. Leave it empty and the site's favicon is used. The platform makes the sizes phones need, including the Android "adaptive" version on your theme colour.

Press Make it an app. The page shows what is in place: the manifest, the offline page, the service worker, the icons and the head tags.

What members see

Once signed in on a phone, Android shows an Install bar at the top of the page (Chrome also offers Add to Home screen in its menu). iPhone users see the same bar explaining Share → Add to Home Screen, because iOS has no install prompt of its own. Dismissing it hides it for a month.

If the phone loses signal, the app shows a plain "You're offline" page instead of a browser error, and carries on once it is back.

Changing things later

Come back to the same page to change the name, start page, colour or icon, or to Switch off (installed copies keep working as the website; new installs stop). Phones re-read the name and icon about once a day.

Stores

Google Play and the App Store need a store wrapper and a developer account on top of this; ask your Butler when you are ready — this page is the foundation for both.