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

You can expect:

• Opinionated posts about Software-related stuff, not limited to technical things

• First-hand experiences, I hope they help!

• Some fun in the form of software-related memes parodying movies I like

An image is worth a thousand words, so a video is probably much more… I hope you enjoy it!

The first one is about generating your own SSL certificates with Certbot, ACME, GClould, and Let’s Encrypt, for free!

Check it out! https://cheatsheets.onemanband.tech/

I have an iPhone and a Chromecast. I like music in the background, and my new TV has crisp sound and an “audio-only” mode, which I love!

Although I could just cast Youtube, it sucks more and more because of the ads, plus I am subscribed to Apple Music!

Quickly reading online tells me this needs a $9.99/month app… Hell no!

Aren’t I a Software Engineer? I tell myself: If there is a better solution than spending $120/year I’ll find it!

There is, and I found it: project your phone screen to your laptop and cast your laptop’s audio to your Chromecast.

Time to prepare: 2-3 minutes.

Ingredients:

• Linux laptop (if you are on Mac, projecting the iPhone is probably even easier…)

• UXPlay to cast your phone audio/video to your laptop.

• MKChromecast to cast your audio to your Chromecast.

• Profit!

UXPlay

$ sudo apt-get install uxplay
$ uxplay

Now your iPhone can be cast to your laptop:

Although UXPlay is pretty stable, remember you’ll be locking your phone, and that can lead to unexpected disconnections, but we are software engineers, aren’t we? Wrap the invocation like this while [ 1 ]; do uxplay; done; and you’ll be good.

MKChromecast

$ sudo apt-get install mkchromecast
$ mkchromecast

That’s it; assuming your Chromecast is in the same network as your laptop, you are now casting your phone’s audio to it.

Similar to UXPlay, there might be unexpected disconnections, but it is even easier than with UXPlay: mkchromecast has a --tries parameter, give it a ridiculously high number and you have fault-tolerance:

$ mkchromecast --tries 1000

Now point your audio sink to use MKChromecast:

Profit!

You jam on your TV! Click below to see it in action:

It even boots the TV if it is off! If anything I observe a slight delay when jumping between songs, additional tweaking might improve that but I really don’t care!

Project(s) shout-out: UXPlay, MKChromecast, XUbuntu