Website Shortcut

Deltac Development

About this app

Personalize your Android homescreen by creating your own icon shortcuts for websites (URL/URIs). Customize your website shortcuts with your own selected text and image. Furthermore, there are no advertisements and it's free. I made it originally for myself, and decided to share. Giving a fair rating is very well appreciated!

From Android Oreo on (due to an API change, upon which this app is built), the bottom right tiny icon of the app the shortcut belongs to is added automatically by the launcher.

Features:
* Choose your own label and icon for the shortcut and the website URL/URI to open
* Icon selection via local file selection
* Works with most icon packs
* Supports usage of general URIs (e.g., mailto:[e-mail] )
* Broad support for image formats: *.png, *.jpg, *.jpeg, *.ico, *.gif, *.bmp
* Automatic https scheme suggestion if it misses from the URL
* Make use of "Share via..." in any other application (e.g., a browser) to conveniently fill the website URL/URI field
* View the labels and website URL/URIs of currently present shortcuts of the app (navigate to the in-app drawer menu -> "Current shortcuts")
* Free
* No advertisements

--- Data policy

Creation of a shortcut is done by passing the shortcut design (label/icon) and an Intent with the website (URL/URI) to the system shortcut manager and the launcher. The system shortcut manager and the launcher create and manage the shortcuts, and maintain them with their associated Intents. In some cases (e.g., upon app, launcher or system update, or restore from back-up), the system shortcut manager or launcher might lose icons of existing shortcuts or even entire shortcuts. It is recommended to keep somewhere a list of labels, icons and website URL/URIs so you can recreate easily. In the app drawer menu, you can open the "Current shortcuts" which displays the labels and website URL/URIs of the still present shortcuts retrieved from the system shortcut manager.

In this version (≥ v3.0.0) a large randomly generated identifier is used to uniquely name shortcuts such that the launcher can uniquely identify shortcuts. In prior versions (≤ v2.1), a creation timestamp was used as unique identifier. Shortcuts created by prior versions (≤ v2.1) will still have their creation timestamp stored within their Intent and unique name.

Uninstalling the app (i.e. via Settings -> Apps -> Application List -> Website Shortcut -> Uninstall) will remove the app from the device, including its data. The Android uninstallation procedure will also notify the system shortcut manager and the launcher, which should remove from it all shortcuts associated with the app.

There are no advertisements in this app.

For information on data policy of previous versions: https://deltacdev.com/policies/policy-website-shortcut.txt

--- App permissions

This application does not require any app permissions.

For information on app permissions of previous versions: https://deltacdev.com/policies/policy-website-shortcut.txt

--- License

Copyright 2015-2022 Deltac Development

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.

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The icons in the options and drawer menu are (based on) Material icons made by Google, which are licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0.
See also: https://fonts.google.com/icons

Ratings and reviews

It Works! Does exactly what it says in an easy way even on Android 9. Many shortcut apps don't actually put the shortcut on the home screen, but this one works. It's advantage over the shortcut features on many browsers is that this one will point to the current default browser instead of the one used to create the shortcut if done from within a browser. Nice advantage if you switch browsers. Only desire a way to suppress the watermark added to the icon. I'd pay for that.

Works Great! I like having shortcuts to frequently used sites on my homepage. Though I was always a little frustrated that they couldn't be edited by changing the name or icon. This app fixed that. I also like that is automatically uses the default web browser to open pages. The only thing that i would change would be to have the option to not have the tiny app icon on each shortcut. Maybe in a paid version?

This app does only one thing and does it very well. I'd grown tired of shortcut icons that pictured only a single letter and was looking for the easiest way to customize icons that couldn't be recognized at a glance. In seconds I can fix that boring icon and make the new shortcut so much easier to identify. Thank you, dev, for sharing this wonderful little tool!

What's new

* Creation form: shortcut directly resembles design + extra app info
* Icon selection limited to local files and thus remove auto-detect (to simplify creation form and as the app purpose is to select your own label/icon; else "Add to homescreen" of browsers suffices)
* "Current shortcuts" in app drawer menu
* New shortcuts: improved open latency by removing go-between activity + uniquely named by randomly generated UUID instead of timestamp
* Performance and theme tweaks
* No app permissions