Site icon on WP8 homescreen

Question

iOS, Android, and even BlackBerry allow you to specify an icon that is displayed when you bookmark a page to the device's homescreen. And now Windows 8 allows you to specify an icon that appears when a page is pinned to the start screen as follows:

<meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="logo144.png"/>

However, this doesn't seem to apply to Windows Phone 8. Is that correct? Is there some other way in WP8 to specify an icon to be used (instead of a screenshot) that my Google ninja skills have failed uncover?

Answer 1

For Windows Phone 8.1 you can specify the image, title, colour of tile and even push notifications using meta tags. For the name use

<meta name="application-name" content="NAME HERE" />

For the tile colour

<meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content=" #009900" />

Logos for all four tile sizes

<meta name="msapplication-square70x70logo" content="smalltile.png" />
<meta name="msapplication-square150x150logo" content="mediumtile.png" />
<meta name="msapplication-wide310x150logo" content="widetile.png" />
<meta name="msapplication-square310x310logo" content="largetile.png" />

Polling is more complex, so all the details are here

Answer 2

Unfortunately, Windows Phone will only pin a screenshot of the current browser window when you click "pin to start". There are ways around this and I have an example with code that displays a custom image and asks users to pin while the image is displayed. With all work-arounds, this has issues since the user has to trigger the image and then use the browser's pinning function. But it is working pretty well.

Link to the example code http://cdpn.io/jlEur

If I were you, before making this code go live, I would at least use a cookie to see if you have prompted the user with the "pin" already.