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One such feature is the ability to add a website shortcut to the Home screen. First, launch Safari and navigate to the website you would like to access from the Home screen. Tap on the Share button and then tap Add to Home Screen.
You can edit the name of the site, but not the URL. Pick a short name so you can easily see it on the Home Screen icon. Home Screen icons can show 10 to 12 characters of text, depending on the width of certain characters. Remaining characters are replaced with ellipses (…).
Now that your icon has a place on the Home Screen, it takes on many of the same behaviors as an app. Tapping on the icon will launch Safari and bring up the desired web page. You can even search for the web app icon using Spotlight.
How to Add a Website to Your iPhone Home Screen Using Chrome
Google’s Chrome browser is actually better than Safari for most tasks. Although they are forced to use Apple’s WebKit rendering engine, I find Chrome to be a little more stable than Safari. I get the impression that Apple doesn’t dedicate a lot of resources to Safari development. As we examined earlier, Apple doesn’t endeavor to support the web, and it shows. They also won’t permit developers to use any web rendering engine other than WebKit. Every browser in the App Store must have Safari “guts”.
Apple imposes other limitations on Chrome. Users cannot directly create a Home Screen icon that launches Chrome with a predetermined URL. Only Safari can do this, however, there’s a neat trick that can work around this limitation.
First, launch Chrome and navigate to the page you wish to use for your Home Screen icon. Copy the URL from the address bar by selecting the text and tapping on Copy.
Next, open a text editor, such as Notes, and paste the URL. Edit the URL so it looks like the following:
googlechrome://www.weather.gov
Replace www.weather.gov (or your website of choice) with the URL you copied. Make sure to leave off the protocol (http, https). It needs to look just like the URL above, with your preferred web address. Now copy this URL.
Next, open the App Store and search for “App Icons”. This app lets you create app icons for your Home Screen. Tap on Get to install the app.
After it is installed, tap on Open.
Paste the text you created in the previous step into the address field and tap Next.
Edit the icon as you desire and then tap on Create.
The App Icons app will launch Safari.
From there, you just use the standard method of adding a Home Screen icon.
Make sure to give your icon a familiar name. You won’t be able to rename it after it is created.
That’s it. When you tap on the icon, the web page will load in Google Chrome. (continue…)
This does not make sense. Eventually you still have to launch Safari to do it. It is better off just to launch the website in Safari in the first place, and then add to homescreen.
Correct. Your comment does not make sense. Thanks for labeling it appropriately.
Well, in 2021, Safari no longer supports my calendar website. So the hack is necessary in my case, and I suspect In many people’s cases.
Unfortunately, it appears the app suggested by this article is nowhere to be found in the App Store. Bummer.
I can’t seem to get this to work with a url starting with https://.
I did remove this part first before copying in to the icon setup.
This is on an iphone xr.
Any ideas gratefully received.
Excellent post! I followed your instructions and got exactly what I expected and wanted: one-click on a home screen icon to see a weather report for my area in Chrome on an iPhone. Apple sucks, but the phone was free to me so I’m doing the environmentally friendly thing by using it till it dies (or I can find someone to give it to). I miss Android.
Yeah, I do the same. The weather.gov forecast is the best, but they don’t have an app. I don’t think they need one. Those kinds of apps are just wrappers around web services anyway. So I just have a shortcut to my pinpoint forecast.
Great Post