Setup your website to allow full-screen on iOS

Jul 8, 2021

Learn how to set up a website to run full screen from the iOS home screen, by adding the apple-mobile-web-app-capable meta tag so it opens without Safari UI.

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While using the iPad Pro I decided to add a few sites to the home screen. It’s not something I usually do on the iPhone, although the same thing works on the iPhone too:

iPhone screenshot showing flaviocopes.com website opened in Safari with visible browser UI and address bar

Press the share button (the one in the middle at the bottom) to show the options panel:

iOS share menu opened in Safari showing Add to Home Screen option among other sharing and action options

Choose “Add to Home Screen”:

Add to Home Screen dialog showing Flavio Copes app icon and website URL with Cancel and Add buttons

Now you’ll see an app on the home screen with the site favicon.

Clicking it will simply open the site in Safari.

But if you add this meta tag to the page:

<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes">

Clicking the app icon will open the site in full screen:

iPhone showing flaviocopes.com website in full screen mode without Safari browser UI or address bar

This works on the iPad as well:

iPad screenshot showing flaviocopes.com website in full screen mode with dark background and no browser interface

This will help you save screen real estate, as the Safari UI would be useless, and will also make the overall app use experience much better.

Of course this has to be supported by the site/app developers, otherwise you can’t make it full screen.

Tagged: Mac · All topics

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