5

I am developing a mobile web app. Currently I have this snippet of jQuery code which checks if the app is running full screen:

if ( !window.navigator.standalone )
{
    $('#content').before( '<div class="notice">To enjoy the mobile experience to its fullest, tap the arrow button on the toolbar below, choose <b>Add to Home Screen</b>, then launch it from there.</div>' );
}

I have a few questions:

  1. Does window.navigator.standalone work on Android phones?
  2. What is the process for a user to add a mobile web app to their home screen? I tried looking for browser screenshots but didn't find any reliable sources.
  3. Is there an equivalent to iPhone's "apple-touch-icon" link element? Found the answer to this here.
Community
  • 1
  • 1
DisgruntledGoat
  • 70,219
  • 68
  • 205
  • 290

2 Answers2

4

A web application can't run directly on android home screen. for that it need some other customized home screen. right now there are two companies who are working to provide a platform from android to run web application standalone.

  • Obigo WRT
  • Opera

where you can make your web application as a widget and then it will run in that runtime. currently obigo have provided the customized home screen. where opera will run web widget within an application.

Saurabh Pareek
  • 7,126
  • 4
  • 28
  • 29
  • 2
    I had a quick play with an emulator, and you can bookmark pages to the home screen (it even picks up the apple-touch-icon). But opening the page doesn't do it full screen. Are you saying there is currently no way that Android web pages can run full screen in the browser? – DisgruntledGoat Apr 21 '11 at 20:41
1

window.navigator.standalone is not supported on Chrome or Android browser.

It appears that a user now can manually add to home screen similar to iOS, but only in Chrome browser, not Android native browser. So this will only work for newer Android phones.

However, at this time there is no way to detect if it is running in standalone.

See Chrome reference: https://developers.google.com/chrome/mobile/docs/installtohomescreen

mike nelson
  • 21,218
  • 14
  • 66
  • 75