Apple touch icon is present
Why it matters
When an iOS user taps Share then Add to Home Screen, Safari looks for an apple-touch-icon. Without one, iOS generates a low-contrast screenshot of the current page and crops it into the icon slot — the home-screen launcher ends up with an unreadable thumbnail instead of your brand mark. This silently degrades the install experience on the platform where home-screen launches correlate most strongly with retention.
Severity rationale
Low because the impact is limited to iOS home-screen users, a small slice of total traffic.
Remediation
Ship a 180x180 PNG at public/apple-touch-icon.png — iOS Safari probes that exact filename before falling back to <link> tags. In Next.js App Router, placing apple-icon.png in app/ produces the correct <link rel="apple-touch-icon"> automatically. Use realfavicongenerator.net to cut every required size from one source SVG so the same mark renders sharply at 120, 152, 167, and 180 pixels.
// app/layout.tsx
export const metadata = { icons: { apple: '/apple-touch-icon.png' } }
DetectionPro
The detection method for this pattern is part of AuditBuffet Pro.
The full method (what to look for, pass and fail conditions, and how results get reported) ships inside the Pre-Launch Checklist Audit. The pattern definition, severity rationale, and remediation remain openly licensed under CC-BY-4.0.
Taxons
History
- 2026-04-18·v1.0.0·Initial import from pre-launch·automated