FME Flow Apps: Add to Home Screen

Introduction

In the context of mobile devices and web browsing, the feature “Add to Home Screen” – also referred to as “A2HS” – provides a means for users to quickly access their favorite websites. Instead of opening your preferred web browsing app on your mobile device (e.g. Chrome, Safari, Firefox, etc) and then navigating to the website via bookmarks or manually typing in the URL, you can simply tap on an icon (you guessed it – directly from your “Home Screen”) to instantly navigate to that favorite website of yours.

Some websites are also now taking advantage of “Progressive Web Apps” (PWAs). This allows for a user to have an “app-like experience” when engaging with a website. And – drum roll – for FME Flow (formerly FME Server) 2020.0 and newer, we have this baked into the Flow Apps (formerly Server Apps) feature. This means that when you load an FME Flow App hosted from an installation of FME Flow 2020.0 or newer, we can now start to add more features that provide that “app-like experience” for supported devices and browsers.

For more information about PWAs, this article posted to MDN Web Docs goes into much more detail.

How Do I Add an FME Flow App to the Home Screen?

Depending on whether you have accessed an FME Flow App from your Android or iOS device, your experience may vary. You will notice that some devices automatically prompt a user to add a website to the Home Screen, while others will require the user to access the “Add to Home Screen” function similar to adding a bookmark. The following example uses an Android version 13 device and the Google Chrome browser. 

Open the FME Flow App in a browser on your mobile, then tap the three dots in the upper right-hand corner of the URL bar.

Next, click Add to Home Screen in the options menu.

From here, there are two different options: Install, and Create Shortcut. Tapping Install will save the FME Flow App as a PWA on your device. Tapping Create Shortcut will save a shortcut to the webpage onto your home screen. Opening a shortcut will simply reopen the FME Flow App as a browser tab. To make use of FME Flow Apps' PWA capabilities for your workspace, tap Install.

Why Should I Add an FME Flow App to the Home Screen?

Adding an FME Flow App to the Home Screen gives users a quick way to access their workflows. If you have created an FME Flow App for data collection, you would be able to “install” this to devices as a PWA and separate the fact that it’s just a website operating in the background. Users will have the experience of using an app on their device – for example, one of the quickest things to note is that the URL bar is not displayed.

Adding an FME Flow App to your mobile device differs from the FME Mobile App, which has been deprecated. For more information, see FME Mobile Deprecation.