Install as an app (PWA)
The site is installable: Add to Home Screen on iOS and Android, Install in a desktop Chrome or Edge. It then opens in its own window, with your instance's name and icon, and no browser chrome.
Nothing to switch on. The two pieces are served automatically.
What makes it installable
A web app manifest at /api/manifest.webmanifest, served by the API rather than shipped as a static file — for the same reason the theme stylesheet is. Everything in it is operator-configurable, and a static manifest.webmanifest in the bundle would bake one instance's branding into every instance's image. It carries the site name and subtitle, the two theme colours resolved from the site's default theme, the uploaded logo and favicon, and shortcuts to Browse, Upload and Notifications.
A service worker at /sw.js, registered on every page load. It has always existed — it is the Web Push receiver — but it used to be registered only when a member turned notifications on, which is too late: a browser decides whether a site is installable at page load, so a site whose worker appears after a settings toggle is not installable for anyone who never visits that toggle.
The icon, and what Chrome wants
sizes is a claim, and browsers act on the claim rather than on the file. Chrome offers to install a site only when its manifest declares an icon of at least 512×512. So the value is measured from the uploaded image's own header at upload time and stored beside it — declaring 512x512 over a 64-pixel logo would buy an install prompt and a blurry home-screen icon, which is worse than no prompt.
What that means in practice:
| What you uploaded | Result |
|---|---|
| A PNG / JPEG / WebP logo of 512×512 or more, square | Installable everywhere, including Chrome |
| A smaller square image | Installs on iOS and Firefox; Chrome will not offer it |
| An SVG, or a non-square image | sizes: any — same as above. An SVG has no intrinsic pixel size, and sizes names squares: a 800×200 banner is not an 800-pixel icon |
| Nothing | The shipped 32×32 favicon.ico. Enough for iOS, not for Chrome |
Upload a square logo of at least 512×512 in Admin → Branding and Chrome starts offering the install.
NOTE
An image uploaded before this measurement existed is recorded as any, because the size was never read and is not being guessed after the fact. Re-uploading it fixes that.
No default 512-pixel icon is shipped to paper over the gap: an invented icon saying "Trackarr" on somebody else's tracker is not an improvement.
What it is not
There is no offline mode, and that omission is a decision rather than a gap. The service worker's fetch handler exists to satisfy the installability check and deliberately never answers a request: without it the browser goes to the network exactly as it would with no worker at all.
Every page here is a live view of a swarm — seeder counts, ratios, a moderation queue, an inbox. A cache-first worker would serve yesterday's numbers with no way for the reader to tell, and on a private tracker the wrong ratio is not a cosmetic problem. An offline shell is worth building the day there is something worth reading offline; a stale one is worth nothing.
Notifications
Installing does not change how notifications work. Web Push is still opt-in per member from Settings → Notifications; see Notifications. An installed app on Android and desktop receives them the same way a tab does. iOS delivers Web Push only to a site that has been added to the Home Screen — so on iPhone, installing is what makes push possible at all.