Settings
Add a shortcut on your phone
- It opens with one tap, full screen, with no address bar, and sits among your apps. Nothing is downloaded and nothing is installed from a store: it is a shortcut to this same site, asking for no permissions and creating no account.
- iPhone and iPad: open the site in Safari — the main page, not this one, because iPhone saves whichever page you are looking at. Tap Share, scroll down to Add to Home Screen, then Add.
- Android: use the button below, or open Chrome’s⋮ menu and choose Add to Home screen.
- Add it before you start a conversation. The home screen copy can keep its own storage, separate from the browser you are reading this in — on an iPhone it normally does — and where it does you arrive there as somebody new, with none of your history.
- Removing the icon removes the shortcut and nothing else.
Chrome and Edge can do this for you. In any other browser, the button shows the two taps your own one needs.
Arrival sound
A short chime when a message arrives, unless the speaker in the header is switched off. This plays it now, so you can tell whether the device will make it.
On a phone, touch the page once after opening it. A browser will not let a page make any sound until it has been touched, and waiting for a message to arrive is the one time nobody does.
Tell me when a message arrives
The chime needs the app to be open. This tells the device itself, so a message can reach you with the app closed or the phone in a pocket.
The notification says only that something is waiting — no name, no sender, nothing of the message. It has to travel through your phone maker's servers to get to you, and then it sits on a lock screen, so there is nothing in it worth reading over your shoulder. Reading the message still means opening the app.
It is for this device, not for you: a phone and a laptop are told separately, and ending a session stops whichever device you ended it on.
Checking what this device can do…
Open an invite with its code
Every invite link ends in ten characters — that is its code. If the link will not open, or it arrived broken, the code does the same job.
It is the only way in on an iPhone that uses the home-screen app: tapping an invite link there opens Safari instead, and Safari keeps its own separate conversations. Open the app from its icon and put the code in here.
This is how a message looks in System.
This is how a message looks in System.
Image beside “Invitation Only”
PNG or JPG, up to 100 KB.