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Fri, Mar 21 2025 8:07 AM	Permanent Link
Eivind	Gents, I have searched the forum and found some information about this topic. Mostly quite old posts so I wondered if the expert opinions of this forum could shed some new light on this. This is what I am planning to do: Create a EWB Web app for phones and tablets mostly. This is no problems and I am well on the way here. Sometime in the future I might convert this into a native Delphi written mobile app, but for now, there is now time to start this process. It will be an web app intended for internal use by our company with about 500 employees. I would like the users to add this web app to their home screen that you can do on most mobile devices now. My question is: 1. Can I have a menu item in my app that adds this to the home screen without having to explain to the user how to do it on iOS, Android, etc? Can I call some kind of script to do this? 2. I want the address bar to not be shown and I have seen some manifest files that could possible do this. I believe I can also add a specific custom icon to this home screen icon. Also specified in the manifest file right? 3. In the old posts from 2015 - 2017 I see some examples where you had to add a reference in the header of the html / javascript files to include this manifest file. Is there options to add these extra scripts now without having to manually add this every time you build a new version? From what I understand, PhoneGap is now dead, but is there new viable options if I wanted to go down this path? Especially when it comes to distribution of an app like this? Thanks to all for sharing your thoughts! Br Eivind
Fri, Mar 21 2025 2:33 PM	Permanent Link
erickengelke	Eivind wrote: > I have searched the forum and found some information about this topic. Mostly quite old posts so I wondered if the expert opinions of this forum could shed some new light on this. This is what I am planning to do: I have half a blog article written on the subject, worked on it this morning before work. > 1. Can I have a menu item in my app that adds this to the home screen without having to explain to the user how to do it on iOS, Android, etc? Can I call some kind of script to do this? I believe so, but I don't know how on iOS, I think I read it's not automatic on iOS. > 2. I want the address bar to not be shown and I have seen some manifest files that could possible do this. I believe I can also add a specific custom icon to this home screen icon. Also specified in the manifest file right? Yes. > In the old posts from 2015 - 2017 I see some examples where you had to add a reference in the header of the html / javascript files to include this manifest file. Is there options to add these extra scripts now without having to manually add this every time you build a new version? Yes, there is a way. I will publish it this weekend. > From what I understand, PhoneGap is now dead, but is there new viable options if I wanted to go down this path? Especially when it comes to distribution of an app like this? I believe phonegap is dead, but many of the things PhoneGap added have been added to all HTML5 browsers. The solution is a PWA (progressive web app). My blog will explain this PWA app you can try : https://www.eng.uwaterloo.ca/~erick/pwa EWB Programming Books and Nice Component Library See my EWB BLOG posts, at: http://www.erickengelke.com