Recently I stumbled on a simple workaround that made me wonder: why aren’t we all doing this already?

Instead of installing a full mobile app through the App Store, you can “install” a web application directly to your home screen as a shortcut. It looks and behaves like an app — without any of the usual friction.

And the advantages are big:

No App Store approvals or guideline headaches.
No device bloat. It’s just a lightweight shortcut.
Same user access and the same icon on your home screen.
Modern web UI/UX is more than good enough for most use cases.
Higher security thanks to the browser sandbox.
Available globally, with no geographic restrictions on what you can install.

This was merely a personal observation until I saw a production app using this approach a few days ago — and it worked beautifully.

When is this the right choice for a business?

If your product doesn’t require heavy offline usage, deep hardware access, or 3D graphics, a web-installed experience can significantly reduce your cost, complexity, and time-to-market.

For many apps, this approach is more than enough — and dramatically simpler.

If you’re building a new product, it’s worth asking:
👉 Do you really need a native app?

Let’s talk techie 🧑‍💻

First off, this works out of the box on any browser on a phone or tablet.

For a neater UX, I know for a fact that Javascript has native support to trigger the dialog where the shortcut option appears through the Web Share API for a long time now and it is widely available.

Still, in those corner cases where it is not available, a GIF showing how to do it (which you will want to show for a graceful UX anyways) should do the trick.

This library seems to be solid, alive and it works in Destkop environments too: https://github.com/philfung/add-to-homescreen. See it in action here: https://philfung.github.io/adhs

You can always find some other alternative, this search might be a good starting point.

Profit!

Credits: animated GIF from https://github.com/philfung/add-to-homescreen