Turn Your Website Into an App — No App Store Needed
Every BrandRafter site on a Starter plan or above now installs on a phone, tablet or computer like an app. Your customer taps once, your icon appears on their home screen, and your website opens full screen with no address bar and no browser tabs around it.
There is no app store listing, no download, and nothing for you or your customer to update.
What a Progressive Web App actually is
A Progressive Web App — PWA — is an ordinary website that a device is willing to treat as an app. The technology has been in Chrome, Safari and Edge for years; what changed is that your site now ships the three small files a browser needs in order to offer the option. Nothing about your pages, your content or your address changes.
What your customer sees
After about thirty seconds on your site — long enough to actually read something first — a small bar slides up from the bottom: "Install", with your business name and your icon. One tap and it is on their home screen. If they dismiss it, it stays dismissed for the rest of that visit and does not follow them around the site.
On an iPhone or iPad the steps are slightly different, because Safari does not offer a one-tap install: they tap the Share button and then "Add to Home Screen". Your site explains this automatically when it detects Safari, and there is a full set of instructions for every device at yoursite.com/install.
Pages keep working on a bad connection
Once someone has opened a page, it is kept on their device. If they lose signal in a basement, a lift or a factory floor, the pages they have already seen still open. When the connection comes back your site quietly checks for anything newer, so nobody is ever left reading a stale price — the copy on the device is a fallback, never the source of truth.
Two parts of your site are deliberately never stored on the device: the customer portal, because it shows one customer's own orders and balances and must never be readable by the next person to pick up that phone, and the QR ordering page, because a restaurant menu has to show what is actually available right now.
Why it is worth having
The difference is not technical, it is a matter of distance. A customer who has bookmarked you somewhere has to remember you exist, open a browser and find the bookmark. A customer with your icon on their home screen sees your business every time they unlock their phone. For a dealer checking stock, a patient booking a follow-up or a regular ordering lunch, that gap is most of the decision.
What you need to do
Nothing. If you are on Starter, Business or Enterprise, your site becomes installable the next time you publish. Your icon is built from your logo automatically, or from your business name and your brand colour if you have not uploaded one — so if you want to control exactly how it looks on a home screen, upload a square logo in Settings before you publish.