Publishing & content
Mobile app & push notifications
Members install your club site to their phone’s home screen and turn on push notifications per device — no app store, nothing for an admin to configure.
Your club site is already a mobile app. Members can install it to their phone's home screen — with your club's name and colour on the icon — and turn on push notifications so the things they care about arrive even when the site is closed. There is nothing for you to build, submit to an app store, or switch on: it works on every plan, on the site you already have.
Who can use this
- Members install the app and turn on push for themselves, from their own account. Nobody can do it for them — the browser only offers it to the person holding the phone.
- Anyone can install the site to their home screen, signed in or not. It is just your website in a window of its own.
- Admins have nothing to configure. There is no admin screen for push, and no setting that turns it on or off for your organisation. What an admin controls is what gets sent — events, fixtures, chat, broadcasts — and members choose which of those reach them.
What's on the page
Two member-facing surfaces do all the work.
The install prompt appears on a member's My account page and on their membership card page. On Android and desktop Chrome or Edge it is an Install app button. On an iPhone or iPad it is a short walkthrough instead — Safari does not offer a button, so members use Share → Add to Home Screen. Once installed, the app opens with no browser address bar, uses your club's primary colour, and shows an icon carrying your club's initials on that colour.
Notification settings live at My account → Notifications. It is a table of notification categories with a column for each way of receiving them — Email, In-app and Push — and a tick box per cell. At the top sits Enable push on this device: the member taps it once per phone, tablet or computer, the browser asks permission, and that device is registered. A member with a phone and a laptop taps it on both.
There is one more entry point: on a team page, a Get live-score notifications button subscribes a signed-in member to that team's scores as they are entered.
Step by step
Tell members how to install the app
- Point them at their account page on your club site.
- Android, Chrome or Edge: tap Install app and confirm.
- iPhone or iPad: tap the Share icon in Safari, scroll to Add to Home Screen, then Add.
- The icon lands on the home screen with your club's colour and initials.
Tell members how to turn on push
- Go to My account → Notifications.
- Tap Enable push on this device and allow notifications when the browser asks.
- Tick the Push column for the categories they want — fixtures, events, chat, payment reminders, and so on.
- Repeat on any other device they use.
On an iPhone, the order matters. iOS only delivers web push to a site that has been added to the home screen, so an iPhone member must install the app first and then open it from the home-screen icon before Enable push on this device will work. Tapping it in Safari will not.
What you do as an admin
Nothing, directly. Publish the event, post the fixture result, send the broadcast, or message the team channel as you normally would — members who have push on for that category get it on their phone. The one thing worth doing is telling members the app exists: a news post or a line in a newsletter with the two sets of steps above is usually all it takes.
Field reference
| What | What it means |
|---|---|
| Install app | Adds your club site to the device's home screen or app list. Uses your club name and theme colour. |
| Add to Home Screen | The iOS equivalent, reached from Safari's Share menu. Required on iPhone and iPad before push will work. |
| Enable push on this device | Registers this one browser on this one device to receive push. Per device, not per account — it does not follow the member to another phone. |
| Email / In-app / Push columns | Which routes a notification category may take for this member. Unticking Push stops that category only; other categories keep arriving. |
| Always on | Categories a member cannot switch off — security alerts, role changes, payment failures, scheduled deletions and announcements from your parent organisation. Everything else is theirs to choose. |
| Get live-score notifications | On a team page: follow that team and receive scores as they are entered. |
Tips & FAQ
Do we need to publish anything to the App Store or Google Play? No. This is your website, installed. There is no submission, no review, no store listing and no separate app to keep up to date — a change you publish on the site is live in the installed app immediately.
Does the app carry our logo? The icon carries your club's initials on your theme's primary colour, not your uploaded logo. That is deliberate: a home-screen icon has to be a square image at fixed sizes, and logos come in every shape and format, so a generated monogram is the one that always looks right. The name under the icon is your club's name.
A member asks why they get nothing on their iPhone. Almost always because the site is open in Safari rather than from the home-screen icon. iOS delivers web push only to an installed site. Ask them to add it to the home screen, open it from there, and then turn push on.
Does push replace email? No — it sits beside it. Each category has its own Email, In-app and Push ticks, so a member can take fixture changes as a push and the monthly newsletter as an email. Turning push on changes nothing about what you send.
Can we send a push to everyone, like a broadcast? Not as a push-only blast. Push is carried by the notification categories — an event, a fixture, a chat message, a broadcast — so the way to reach members on their phone is to send the thing itself. Members who have that category ticked for Push get it.
How quickly does a push arrive? Within a few minutes, not instantly. Pushes are gathered and sent in batches rather than one at a time. For something genuinely urgent — a ground closure an hour before play — SMS is the faster channel.
A member turned push on, then changed their mind. They can untick the Push column for whichever categories they no longer want, which is the usual answer. To stop push from the device entirely, they turn notifications off for the site in their browser or phone settings — there is no single "unsubscribe this device" button in the app today.
A member's old phone still counts as a device. A device that is wiped, or a browser whose data is cleared, simply stops receiving. It costs nothing and needs no tidying up, but it does mean a member who has enabled push on four devices over the years is registered four times; only the ones that still exist will show anything.
The button says push is not available. Either the browser does not support web push — some older browsers and some privacy modes do not — or notifications have been blocked for the site, in which case the browser will not ask again and the member has to allow them from the site's own settings. On iPhone, see the home-screen answer above.
Does the app work offline? Partly. Pages the member has not loaded still need a connection, but opening the app with no signal gives a plain offline page rather than a browser error.