Install
Put it on your home screen.
There is nothing to download and no app store to go through. The Dynamic installs from the browser you are reading this in, in about twenty seconds — and here is exactly where to tap on an iPhone, on Android, and on a computer.
- Open mydynamicapp.com in Chrome or Edge.
- Look at the right-hand end of the address bar for the install icon — a small screen with an arrow pointing into it.
- No icon there? In Chrome: the three-dot menu, then “Cast, save and share”, then “Install page as app”. In Edge: the three-dot menu, then “Apps”, then “Install this site as an app”.
- Click “Install”. It opens in a window of its own and turns up in your dock, taskbar or Start menu like anything else.
It opens in a window of its own after that, rather than as one tab among thirty, and keeps a place in the dock or taskbar.
If it is not there: Safari on a Mac has no address-bar icon and never has: use File → Add to Dock instead. Firefox does not install web apps at all, on any platform — it goes on working perfectly as an ordinary tab.
Why it is not in the App Store
The Dynamic is a web app. It runs in the browser, and installing it means telling the browser to give it an icon and a window of its own rather than a tab — which is a control Apple, Google and Microsoft each put somewhere different, and each call something slightly different. That is the whole reason this page exists.
What you get out of it is more than a shortcut, and some of it matters here more than it would elsewhere. There is no purchase and no download — nothing in an App Store account, nothing in a family sharing list, nothing in a phone bill. On an iPhone the name under the icon is yours to set at the moment you add it, so what sits on your home screen can say whatever you would rather it said. And updates simply arrive: there is no version to install, and no notification telling anybody that you updated something.
What changes once it is installed
It opens full screen, with no address bar and no browser chrome around it, and it stays signed in — so opening it is one tap rather than a tap, a search and a password. It starts faster, because the shell of the app is already on the device rather than being fetched every time.
On an iPhone it is also what makes notifications work at all. Apple only delivers web push to an app that has been added to the home screen, so the switch in Settings will refuse to turn on in a browser tab — which reads as a broken feature and is really a missing step. This is the single commonest thing people write in about, and this is the answer to it.
Nothing else changes. It is the same app, the same account and the same data, and removing the icon later removes nothing but the icon.
Do it on both phones
Almost everything here has two sides — a task is set by one of you and proved by the other, an ask is answered, a check-in is replied to. Most of that is worth knowing about when it happens rather than the next time somebody thinks to look, and that means both of you installed and both of you with notifications on.
The steps are the same on the other person’s phone as they were on yours, and the picker at the top of the card above switches between them — so you can read the iPhone steps out loud from an Android phone, or the other way round.
If something goes wrong
There is no “Add to Home Screen” in the list. On an iPhone, check you are in Safari rather than Chrome or Firefox, then scroll the share list itself downwards — the option sits below the row of app icons rather than among them. On Android, check you are in Chrome and not in a private tab.
It asked me to sign in again. Once, and only once. The home-screen app has its own private storage, separate from the browser tab it was added from, so the first time you open it there is nothing signed in yet. After that it stays.
The notification switch will not turn on. On an iPhone, open the app from the home screen icon rather than from Safari, then try the switch again. If it says notifications are blocked, that is the phone’s own permission rather than ours — it is in the device’s Settings, under the app.
I want it off this phone. Press and hold the icon and remove it, exactly like any other app. Nothing in your account is deleted by that — deleting the account itself is a separate, deliberate thing, on your profile.