Do you want to install the RootsMagic Community app?

I just transferred to a new Samsung phone. When I opened a tab in Chrome on this website, it repeatedly prompted maybe 3 times “Do you want to install the RootsMagic Community app?”. I ignored or closed it until it went away because I was sure I did not have it on my old phone and had never heard of it before. Subsequently, I searched for it in the Google Play Store and could not find it. I did have the Discourse app on the old phone because I thought the RootsMagic Community was based on that platform but had found no way to reach the RMC with that app. As it was unused, I deleted it from the new phone.

  1. Has anyone else encountered the prompt?
  2. Does anyone know why it would come up? @mike ?

I normally don’t access this site on my phone or tablet, but when I tried today, I got the same prompt, both on my old Nokia 3, and my Samsung Galaxy Tab A7. where I already had a similar app for the Gramps forum.

With these apps, I can see the comunities as if they’re running in a browser without the menu’s and address bar, just like I see them on my desktop when I press F11. And I think that’s because these ‘apps’ are simply shortcuts to Chrome with the proper settings. They’re both very small, only 342 kB.

I bet that they come up because the Discourse software detects that you’re using Chrome, so that it can offer this thing, which looks like a Progressive Web App (PWA).

My guess is that your Discourse app didn’t find the RootsMagic Community, because it’s not hosted on the discourse.group domain that we use for Gramps. The software looks the same on both, so it is Discourse.

That sounds plausible. Thanks for the explanation. I can confirm that it is a Chrome related feature because when on the RootsMagic Discourse Community page, the browser’s dropdown menu (vertical ellipsis or 3-dots) gets the added menu item “Install app” which does not appear when on other sites.

So I installed it on my phone and voila! it appears as you describe among the apps. I also got a notification from Chrome on my Windows laptop that the app had been installed but that turned out to have been sent from the phone via PhoneLink, not that it was installed on the laptop. However, browsing with both Chrome and Edge on Windows, I find the option to install RootsMagic Community. In Chrome, it’s via the vertical ellipsis; on Edge, it’s an icon to the right of the address field
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Neat!

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