Alright so many of you might file this under the, “Yeah, of course you can do this" category, the number of folks I’ve seen sharing this tip today leads me to believe that the whole add web sites to your home screen thing has become lost knowledge in the modern days of the App Store. Back in the day before the App Store existed, Apple’s answers to folks looking to have third party apps on their phone was having people build web apps that operated inside of a browser, then saving them as bookmarklets to the home screen. Thinking back on it, it was a little absurd how excited we were to add things like basic tip calculators to the home screen of our first generation iPhones, but, hey, different times and all.
This morning I detailed plans we have for the future of the site now that the app doesn’t work in iOS 11 anymore. Additionally, I wrote up a guide on how to keep getting push notifications. We’re still working on Watch List functionality, but in the meantime, here’s a super easy way to keep TouchArcade on your home screen in iOS 11 if you’re used to visiting us through hitting an app icons:
First thing to do is just load up TouchArcade.com in Safari, like you normally would visit the site without using the app. From there, you hit the button which brings up the share sheet, which I circled in red. Depending on how much third party software you have that has put things in your share sheet, you might need to scroll to the right a little bit, but you’re looking for “Add to Home Screen." Press that, and you’ll get the next screen:
Here you can edit what the icon is named, which just defaults to “TouchArcade." Hit “Add" and blammo, you’ve now got an app icon on your home screen that brings you directly to TouchArcade.com that looks just like the old TouchArcade app. It’s not a super great replacement, but this is how you will access the “new" TouchArcade once the new mobile view launches. If you’ve got the site set up like this on your phone, one day you’ll just automagically get the new site.
Again, if you’re a veteran in the iOS space this tip might be ultra obvious, but if you got your first iPhone after the App Store launched chances are you might not have even known this was a thing. If that describes you, well, hopefully you add TouchArcade to your home screen using the simple method outlined above.
