Put FWF Ledger on your iPhone

It takes about twenty seconds, costs nothing, and there is no App Store download. You end up with an icon on your Home Screen that opens FWF Ledger full screen, like any other app.

Do this in Safari

You don't need an account yet — this works signed out, and you can sign in afterwards from the icon.

  1. Open Safari and go to app.financewithoutfluff.com.
  2. Tap the ••• button in the bar at the bottom of the screen, then tap Share.If your Safari shows a row of tabs instead, you'll see the Share button directly — it's the square with an arrow pointing up out of the top. Tap that.
  3. Scroll down the list that slides up. Past Copy, past Add Bookmark, is Add to Home Screen. Tap it.
  4. Turn on Open as Web App if it isn't already. This is the switch that makes it open full screen rather than as another Safari tab.
  5. Tap Add in the top right. The name can stay FWF, or type your own.

You'll know it worked when

A red F icon named FWF appears on your Home Screen, on the last page of icons. Tap it and FWF Ledger fills the screen — no address bar along the top, no Safari buttons along the bottom. That missing address bar is the difference between an installed app and a bookmark.

To remove it later, touch and hold the icon and delete it the same way you would any app. Nothing about your account changes.

If you can't find “Add to Home Screen”

You're probably not in Safari. This is far and away the most common reason it fails. Chrome, Firefox, Edge and DuckDuckGo on iPhone can offer it, but they don't all do, and they each word it differently. Safari always has it. If you're not sure which browser you're in, open the grey compass icon — that's Safari — and type the address again.

It can also be hidden. Scroll to the very bottom of that share list, tap Edit Actions, then tap the green + beside Add to Home Screen. It stays in the list from then on.

Already installed? Swipe down on your Home Screen and search for FWF before you try again — it may already be sitting on a page you don't often look at.

Why it matters more on an iPhone

Alerts need this

Apple only delivers notifications from a website to an icon that's on your Home Screen. Read FWF Ledger in a Safari tab and your iPhone will never show you a notification from it, however the settings are set — there is nothing we can build to work around that. So if you want your weekly check-in to arrive as a notification rather than only as an email, the icon has to exist first.

Once it does: open FWF Ledger from the Home Screen icon, go to Settings, and turn on push notifications there. It's off until you turn it on, and it's per device.

Why Apple works this way — tap to read

Apple treats a Home Screen icon as your consent — you deliberately put it there, so a notification from it isn't a stranger interrupting you. A page open in a browser tab hasn't cleared that bar. It arrived with iOS 16.4 in 2023, and it applies to every website on iPhone, not just this one.

One consequence worth knowing: because every browser on iPhone runs on Apple's engine underneath, this rule is the same in Chrome and Firefox as it is in Safari. Installing is the only route, whichever browser you started in.

iPad, and other phones

An iPad works exactly the same way, and the icon lands on its Home Screen alongside your other apps. If you also carry an Android phone, the steps there are different and shorter — they're on their own page. Installing on one device doesn't affect the others; your numbers sync regardless.