Add to Home Screen without creating PWA
I was recently reading about Progressive Web Apps and out of curiosity opted to re-add one of my regular news blogs to my home screen. I then promptly deleted my previous home screen bookmark of the same site. Well, the new link opens the site in a non-standard Safari view, without any of Safari's UI (no address bar, can't open other tabs, no forward/back, etc).
I much prefer to open web links directly in the browser. Only I can't figure out how to add this site back to my home screen as a 'dumb' link instead of a PWA. Is there a way to add web links to the home screen that will avoid using the PWA view?
The website is https://www.universalhub.com
I actually found a work-around for this by referencing an answer on another question.
Short answer: yes!
I faced the same issue and basically tricked my iPad, you simply turn on airplane mode, you don't hit the redirect, you store the "server not found" page on the home screen and you are done :-)
Hope you can now resolve your 4 year old question.
The only addition to this method is that now on iOS 12 you need to turn on airplane and turn off wifi in order to drop all network connections.
Big thanks to Von Lion