Adding a bookmark to an Android Home screen
January 2nd, 2010 by 
Phil
It’s easy to add a link to a URL to the home screen on the iPhone. When you’re looking at a web page, just hit “+” and select “Add to Home Screen”. On Android it’s slightly more involved:
- Bookmark the page you want to add to a home screen
- Go to the home screen you want to add the link to
- long-press in an empty space to bring up the “Add to Home Screen” menu
- select “Shortcuts”
- select “Bookmark”
- choose your bookmark!
The icon you get will be the standard bookmark image with a small overlay of the site’s favicon. If the site provides <link rel="apple-touch-icon-precomposed" href="blah" /> in the <head> then that will be used in preference. Both the iPhone and Android support the apple-touch-icon-precomposed link rel-type so it’s the preferred way of setting a custom icon for your webpage.
Update: I should mention that the resolution of the image you link to shouldn’t be too important but that the Android Icon Guidelines say it should be a 48×48 transparent PNG. I ignored that and used an icon I had lying around that was 256×256 and the OS scaled it just fine. Google themselves use this technique and their image is 57×57. You can find lots of good, free icons for your apps on Smashing Magazine.
Tagged: android, iphone, mobile, pics | 
3 Comments »
Great information. Took a bit of Googling to track it down but this is exactly what I needed…
Posted by Clark on January 27th, 2010 at 6:08 amI try it in my website and it didn’t work. It works for iphone.
Posted by Dario on March 11th, 2010 at 11:46 pmIt seems to require Android 2.0 or greater, but if you have that then it *does* work!
Posted by Phil on March 12th, 2010 at 7:20 pm