This is Google App Banner feature, and it’s live on latest Discourse.
Clicking Add to Home Screen will create a shortcut on your phone home screen, using your forum name and icon, that when clicked will show a splash screen like this:
Also, I think it makes the page way more difficult to be garbage collected from ram, but I need to confirm if this is true or just my bias.
This is it. I think this will make your users come back more to your community!
FAQ:
It isn’t showing for me!
your site must be https, this will never appear if your site is plain old http
you must set a 512x512 png on large_icon_url site setting
Google controls when the banner will appear, the today default is: The user has visited your site at least twice, with at least five minutes between visits.
If a user dismisses the banner, will it appear again? No. Not unless the user clears their history. We want to make sure users have a good experience. We will likely be changing all the heuristics over time.
Will the criteria for App Banner activation change over time? The criteria for App Banner activation change over time.
We can’t give specifics right now but as we better understand what makes an experience the user will want to install we will want to make sure the criteria are updated and also well understood for developers.
I’m liking this, but now I need to be even more creative to find out which topic I’m inon mobile since the address bar was the best workaround for that:
One minor question though – which setting controls the image on the splash screen? It’s popping up for meta, but not for my install. I’ve got all the ‘required’ logo URL stuff up, but no images appear. It’s a minor thing, but the icon gives it that lovely polish feeling.
Lemme clarify - I’m able to see the image icon on the home screen but it’s still not popping up on the splash screen.
I added to home screen before setting the apple_touch_icon_url. After changing the site setting, I removed the shortcut, and re-added it from the Chrome menu. The icon shows up on the home screen properly, but the splash screen only shows the site title, and no icon appears.
Not sure if matters to mention, but all of my logo URLs are specified as relative /Uploads/...
I attempted to clear cache, reload, and re-add the shortcut but no dice.
Picture worth a thousand words. Tested with absolute URLs, but no change, and a restart or two in chrome. I’ll keep at it and let you know if I hit a fix here.
Perhaps this could be renamed to something platform agnostic? Or it could have a note added that indicates this image is used for other purposes?
It also has to be Chrome 51 or newer, right? I usually stick with Chrome Beta on mobile for day-to-day use. It could be a few months until the average person sees the banner on their device.
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