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Ask HN: “Add to Home Screen” webapps

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Ask HN: “Add to Home Screen” webapps

#1

Post by oyeanuj »

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.

Re: Ask HN: “Add to Home Screen” webapps

#2

Post by 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.

Re: Ask HN: “Add to Home Screen” webapps

#3

Post by oyeanuj »

openthc wrote: post #2

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…

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?
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