Adding the Swift Forums to the iOS Home Screen currently results in a shortcut that opens the Forums in Safari. Adding an HTML meta tag, <meta name=”apple-mobile-web-app-capable” content=”yes”>, would make the forums open in a more app-like way.
Additionally, the icon is currently a Discourse icon, I think there is another meta tag that specifies an icon.
That one is nice because it provides Notifications. I would however prefer not having the browser chrome around the Forums, since it seems all Navigation is possible using the web app itself.
Wrt. notifications, maybe future iOS versions will allow web notificatoins, at which point The native app wouldn’t be needed at all.
Since this hasn't been specifically posted anywhere - this feature seems to have been enabled. The Swift Forums work as an app when saved to the homescreen.
@MutatingFunk perhaps I am missing it but I do not see the <meta> that @ahti mentioned and my page is not running in full-screen mode. Also the icon still looks like the black one.
Waiting for feedback from someone else, I'm not noticing any difference.
When I originally posted in this thread, ten days ago, this wasn't working. I'm very curious as to why it's started working for me, but not for anyone else. I've been testing on iPad.
The reason I thought to check was that, earlier today, my internet connection was lost [edit]while browsing the forums[/edit], and I got a Discourse-style page saying the ‘app’ wasn't connected to the internet and wouldn't work. At the time, I was running through the Discourse app which uses SafariVC, so I would have expected a generic Safari ‘load failed’ error.
I've just tried on both iPhone and iPad, neither is working. I've also cleared caches and checked the Safari inspector and couldn't find the tag. Is there maybe some load balancer or caching layer that might still be serving me the old page?
Whatever got it working, before the Swift forums were updated with this tag, must have been a Discourse-side update. Perhaps an A-B test, or slow to roll out due to caching? I have no idea.
edit: Unless it's somehow the iOS 11.3 beta? I've heard ‘service workers’ mentioned a bit.
I just tried my Chrome, which had never been on the page and it receives the tag (with the same messed-up quotes), so I assume it must be a caching thing, despite me clearing caches