Have you wanted a Cheers & Gears app?

[Drew Dowdell]

You can now install Cheers & Gears as an app on your phone and tablet.  It's not in the app store; it's called a Progressive Web App, or PWA for short.

The advantages are you can get notifications on your phone (don't worry, they're configurable, I'll show you further down) when someone replies to your post or sends you a message.

iOS (16.4 and up)

Make sure you're on the latest iOS version. iOS 16.4 was released on March 27th, 2023 and is the minimum for this process to work on Apple devices.

On iOS devices, open Cheers & Gears in Safari and click the share icon at the bottom of the Safari window.

Then scroll down to Add to Homescreen.

Tada! You now have an icon for Cheers & Gears.

 

 

Android

I don't know the minimum Android version, but it works on a Pixel XL running Android 10 from September 2019, if your device is older than that, it's time for a new phone.

On Android devices, open Cheers & Gears in Chrome

Click the three verticle dots in the upper right corner and scroll down to Install.  This will add Cheers & Gears to your app drawer and you'll need to move it to your home screen if you wish.

On both iOS and Android, you will need to log in from your new app icon before proceeding.  Both systems treat this as a new app and will not copy your login from Safari or Chrome.

 

 

Adjusting Notifications

Now that you have the app installed, you may want to adjust your settings. 

From inside the new app, after you've logged in, click the Menu Hamburger icon in the upper right, click the notification bell, then click notification settings or click this link

Scroll to the bottom of the page and find the section "Notification Types Available" and enable notifications.

Once enabled, scroll up and adjust the various content types to your liking.  To get notifications on your phone, select the Notification + Push Option.

Now that I'm getting notifications on my phone, I also uncheck the e-mail notification option to keep my inbox clean.

The PWA does not yet support notification badges, but I expect it will soon. Enabling this technology on the iOS side was a bit of a surprise from Apple in the recent update, so the software developer that makes the software for Cheers & Gears wasn't super ready for it.

[David]

Thank you Drew