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Ask HN: “Add to Home Screen” webapps

7 points by oyeanuj ↗ HN
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

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openthc
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
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
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