How to identify user click from iphone "home screen"

Question

Some users of my mobile site add the site to home screen in safari in iPhone (using "add to home screen"). Is there any way to know if they come from clicking the home icon, or typing the url?

Or, to solve my problem, I want know how many users "add to home screen" and come back

Many thanks Bob

Answer 1

That's it ! I guess you can't ! You are not supposed to know what a user does outside of your application (of any kind, thanks BoltCloch ;-)). That's the whole principle of sand-boxed environment.

Answer 2

I've tested it by setting up a webserver on my mac. The difference when starting the site from a webclip is, that mobile safari sends out additional requests for the homescreen icon:

GET /apple-touch-icon-57x57-precomposed.png HTTP/1.1
Host: 10.0.2.1
User-Agent: MobileSafari/6533.18.5 CFNetwork/485.12.7 Darwin/10.4.0
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: de-de
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
Connection: keep-alive

Other observed requests are:

GET /apple-touch-icon-57x57.png HTTP/1.1

GET /apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png HTTP/1.1

GET /apple-touch-icon.png HTTP/1.1

You could check for those GET-Requests on the server.

I don't know if this happens everytime when clicking the webclip or only once.