Why shouldn't I be able to add my repo as a bookmark on the iPhone Home Screen?

[hepcat72]

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Today, I tried to had a bookmark to my repo to the iPhone home screen. I was in Safari. I tapped the share icon. I selected "add home screen". It let me do it, but the resulting bookmark only included the GitHub domain. It did not include the path to my repo and I was unable to edit the URL. Why in the world would this be not possible? I can go to my repo in the Safari browser on my iPhone. If I can go to the page in my browser, I should be able to bookmark it on my home screen. What is the thinking here? I'm assuming that GitHub has somehow disabled this ability. I've never encountered any website that didn't let me bookmark it on my Home Screen. I'm at a complete and total loss as to why this shouldn't work.

[hepcat72]

Ah! I figured out a hacky workaround!:

1. Go to the repo page
2. Turn on airplane mode
3. Edit the URL in Safari (I changed "https" to "http")
4. Tap "go" (you get a can't open page screen)
5. Tap the share icon
6. Select add to Home Screen
7. Edit "Can't open page" to the name of the repo (note the URL magically has "https" and is the URL you want)

The resulting Home Screen bookmark is functional but doesn't have a nice GitHub icon. Instead, it is an ugly gray icon with a big white "C", but whatever.

Why it is necessary to jump through these hoops is beyond me.

[hepcat72]

Another workaround, perhaps a bit better: create a shortcut with only an "open URL" action then add that shortcut to the Home Screen (which allows you to set any icon you want).

[iskae]

Hey @hepcat72 👋

Thanks for reaching out, but unfortunately this community is dedicated to the native GitHub Mobile Apps. Would you be interested in giving our apps a shot? You can mark your favorite repos and access them directly from GitHub iOS home screen in this case 🙇

Cheers!

[Hariswar8018]

This issue is actually tied to how GitHub serves its content, not a restriction they intentionally set. GitHub pages (like repos) use security headers like Content-Security-Policy and X-Frame-Options to prevent things like clickjacking. On iOS, when you try to "Add to Home Screen," Safari essentially tries to treat the site like a standalone app (a "web app"). But if the site doesn't explicitly allow this behavior — which GitHub doesn’t — iOS may fallback to just linking the root domain (github.com), not the full path.

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[johngalino78-dot]

Okay tread

[johngalino78-dot]

Trrad again

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[Adithya703]

iOS does not always use the exact URL you are viewing when you click Share → Add to Home Screen.
Rather, it makes use of what Safari believes to be the website's "canonical" URL, which GitHub specifically designates as github.com for each repository page.

Your shortcut collapsed to just the bare domain because of this.

A Fix for it would be by
Going to the shortcuts and click on Add Action
then choose Open URL's
past the repo url and add that to the homescreen

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