Configuring Android Web Applications
iPhone web apps have four configuration features available (not including the HTML5 application cache) to configure how web pages behave when you save the web page to the home screen as a bookmark.
- You can specify the home page icon.
- You can specify a startup image that displays while the web page is loading.
- You can hide the browser UI.
- You can change the status bar color.
The four features work by adding tags to the <head> like this:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon" href="/custom_icon.png"/>
<link rel="apple-touch-startup-image" href="/startup.png">
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black" />
Naturally, none of these "apple-" specific tags do anything in Android. But is there any way to do something equivalent? [At a minimum, I want users to be able to add my web page to their Android home screen (e.g. in Android 2.0) and have a pretty hi-res icon.]
Answer
When you create a shortcut on the home screen to a bookmark, Android will use a apple-touch-icon-precomposed if present (but not apple-touch-icon) as a high-res icon:
<link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="/custom_icon.png"/>
As for the rest of the features, I don't think there's any way to do this at present without publishing an Android app that acts as a wrapper for your website.