I’m accessing a community-run site on a Samsung Android device and using the Samsung Internet browser v30.0.0.67. The browser has an icon in the address bar that offers to to download the page as a (presumably PWA) shortcut to the homescreen, but when I use it I just get a notification saying “ failed to download”. It happens on the community site and on this website as well, with the domain in the notification being Meta.
Conversely, I accessed the site with Safari on an iPad with iPadOS 27 and added the community site to my homescreen with no issue.
Is there anything in the Samsung browser settings that could restrict app/pwa install? Does the same thing happen if you install Chrome and try adding a shortcut from it instead?
For me it works fine in Chrome and Edge but it didn’t work in the Samsung browser. I tried whether enabling “Install unknown apps” for the Samsung browser helped, which was mentioned here, but it didn’t help. I didn’t expect it to help because the error was not “unsafe app blocked” and the other browsers don’t need that to be enabled, but I tried anyway.
I also found Reddit where the “silently failing” seems to be what happens when I try to install Discourse Meta, but there was nothing I could try, so I decided it’s time for someone else to look at this.
Also “add to home screen” works, it’s only “install as web app” that fails
Doing “Add to home screen” does at least give the same single-tab full screen app experience I was looking for, but not sure how the experience differs between that method and the PWA that gets downloaded.
Little off topic but is PWA support kind of dying off? I don’t believe Firefox natively supports PWAs and I need like an external tool to get something like PWAs working on my desktop
