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Overview

Internal and private apps don’t have a public URL you bookmark directly — you open them through Stardeck. But for apps you use every day (a POS, a floor dashboard, a stock-room scanner), opening Stardeck first and tapping through is friction. Home screen pinning lets you add the app straight to your phone or tablet home screen so it launches like a native app: its own icon, full-screen, opening on the exact view you pinned. Two pieces make this work:
  • Per-app home-screen pin — when you “Add to Home Screen” from Safari or Chrome, the pin captures this app (and the exact view you’re on), not the Stardeck site as a whole.
  • Standalone mode — an optional per-app toggle that strips the Stardeck shell so the app owns the entire screen.
Pinning is most useful for internal and private apps. Public apps already live on a stable public URL you can bookmark or pin directly — see App Visibility for the difference.

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Pinning an app to your home screen

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iPhone & iPad (Safari)

  1. Open the app through Stardeck — from the Pinned Apps rail on your dashboard, or via Settings → General → Visit Site.
  2. In Safari, tap the Share button.
  3. Choose Add to Home Screen.
  4. Confirm the name and tap Add.

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Android (Chrome)

  1. Open the app through Stardeck — from the Pinned Apps rail on your dashboard, or via Settings → General → Visit Site.
  2. In Chrome, tap the ⋮ menu (top right).
  3. Choose Add to Home screen (it may read Install app).
  4. Confirm the name and tap Add / Install.
The new icon launches the app directly. Because each app serves its own pin target, the icon opens that app — not the Stardeck dashboard — and lands on the same view you were looking at when you pinned it.

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Standalone mode (Show app shell)

By default, opening an internal or private app shows the Stardeck app shell around it — navigation, an address bar, and the Starcat agent chat. That’s handy while you’re building and iterating, but for a real day-to-day business app you often want the app to own the whole screen. Each internal or private app has a Show app shell toggle under Settings → General: Turn it off for a standalone experience — ideal for an app you’ve pinned to the home screen, where the surrounding Stardeck chrome would just get in the way.
The Show app shell toggle only appears for internal and private apps. Public apps are always served directly at their public URL, so there’s no shell to toggle.

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App icon

When you pin an app, the home-screen icon and the browser tab favicon use your deployed app’s own icon — its favicon or apple-touch-icon — not the generic Stardeck mark. If your app doesn’t define one, Stardeck falls back to its default icon. To control the icon your users see, set a favicon / apple-touch-icon in your app the same way you would for any web app. Stardeck forwards it automatically.

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Surfaces: per-experience install identity

If your product has multiple Surfaces, each Surface can have its own PWA name, icon, and launch path. Pin the Surface you want on that device — for example an iPad POS versus a kitchen display — instead of expecting one app-wide pin to cover every experience. Internal Surfaces also support a per-Surface Show app shell override so a pinned station can open without Stardeck chrome.

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Putting it together

For an app that should feel native on a phone or tablet:
  1. Set the app’s visibility to internal or private (see App Visibility).
  2. Give the app its own favicon / apple-touch-icon so the home-screen icon is branded.
  3. Turn Show app shell off in Settings → General for a clean standalone launch.
  4. Open the app and Add to Home Screen from Safari (iOS) or Chrome (Android).
The result: a branded icon that opens your app full-screen, straight to the right view, with no Stardeck chrome in the way.
Pinning controls how an app launches, not who can reach it. For access rules, see App Visibility.