Home screen shortcut for one tap access to a file on Android

🌟Features
#1

Hi,

I would really appreciate to be able to add a home screen shortcut for a Dynalist “file” on my phone. This way I would be able to open my shopping list with just one tap.
Would you please consider implementing this feature?

Having a “Quick add” style widget would be nice too. The Android application startup time on my Nexus 5 is not that great to be honest.

–
Dmitry

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#2

Hi @Dmitry1,

Interesting request! We’ll definitely think about it.

I remember seeing a similar function in WeChat, where you can send a conversation to the home screen, making it easy to talk to frequently talked-to people.

#3

As a quick solution, you should be able to register an intent in the AndroidManifest file. That would ‘catch’ all the requests to dynalist.io and open the app instead.

From there, we could save regular bookmarks to our document locations and open them in the app directly from the desktop.

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#4

I would love this functionality also. Many apps allow you to add shortcuts on the android home screen to access a particular “document” (eg google docs / evernote / etc.) and this would be really useful with dynalist. Especially if it allowed you to open any zoomed-location / url within a file.

For instance I have my todo lists within a “todo” dyanlist document. And my work ones are under one bullet / home under another / etc. It would be great to be able to open those directly.

The most flexible solution would seem to be to to open any dynalist url (as that would include searches etc.) in the dynalist app rather than in chrome. This would also mean links in other apps to dynalist documents would open within the dynalist app - eg if I clicked on a link from within google keep (not just shortcuts on the home screen).
My understanding is that this would be relatively simple to set up as you “just” need to make android open dynalist links in the app rather than in the chrome browser but I am not someone who understands these things in any detail so could well be way off the mark.

(ps I hope this is the best place to mention this - I have seen it suggested in a few discussions but some seemed to be about a variety of issues, not just this one)

1 Like
#5

I too would like this feature. OneNote let’s you add a shortcut to a page, a section, a notebook. It is great, it really reduces the friction. Personally I would recommend allowing bookmarks to be placed as a shortcut, but obviously others will see it differently.

Please do think about this, it would allow Dynalist to be more and more the default place to store, sort and think about things.

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#6

I just wanted to give my +1 for the solution proposed by Keith_Crone. It have not UI impact so doesn’t require a lot of planning, implementation is trivial (adding a few entries to xml file, well described here: https://stackoverflow.com/a/3472228) and makes life a way easier (finding a particular item in mobile version of the app takes a lot of effort).
If someone is interested in an ugly workaround, you can just browse to a target note/file in Chrome and choose “Add to home screen” option. It works, but it doesn’t support offline and opens very slowly (in background it launches a new instance of Chrome browser and loads all the data, instances are not shared between different shortcuts if you have a few of them).

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#7

Edit: I should have fully read this thread because I just realized that @Piotr_Lewalski already covered this. But I’d definitely also like to vote for prioritizing the ability to ‘catch’ Dynalist.io URLs!

I’m not familiar with the technicalities behind shortcuts to Android apps, but I think I’ve found a partial solution.

If you go to an item in the Chrome app and then tap “Add to Home Screen”, a shortcut of some sort is added to the home screen. This shortcut seems to open the Dynalist item as some sort of web app or something, and it’s faster than simply loading the URL in Chrome.

The reason this is so far only a partial solution to me is that I prefer to access my shortcuts in other ways. For example, I use Nova Launcher which allows me to define custom gestures which activate a customizable shortcut.

What I really want is a specific gesture to open a specific Dynalist item. I currently only have 2 options as far as I understand, and neither are perfect:

  1. Make the gesture activate the Dynalist App. This is super fast if the Dynalist app was already opened, however I can’t figure out any way to configure which item the app opens on (seems like the only possible behavior is to open on whichever item was previously opened.
  2. Open the URL to the specific item. This solves the issue of getting to the exact item that you want to get to, however it seems to only ever open in Chrome.

How is it possible that Google Chrome can make the exact kind of shortcuts I want through the “Add to Home Screen” button, but normal URLs open in the regular chrome app? My guess is that Dynalist is a Progressive Web App.

So correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that while Chrome’s “Add to Homescreen” functionality is an adequate solution for home screen shortcuts, @Keith_Crone’s broader solution has still not been implemented and would be ideal for users who want to configure shortcuts outside of the home screen.

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#8

this feature used to be great with evernote until they killed it. i had shortcuts to all my important documents added to the app “folder organiser” and then that folder could be launched from a single shortcut

i would love to be able to do this again but i really hope it wont be a “add to homescreen” only option because then you cant use the shortcuts with any of the swipe launchers such as swiftly switch. having to go back to the homescreen every time you want to launch something is a really bad idea that android picked up from apple unfortunately

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