Installing the CDSS on your phone

What Installing Does

The CDSS can sit on your home screen like any other app, and open in its own window with no browser bar around it.

There is nothing to download from an app store, and no account to make. The steps below put an icon on the home screen and tell the phone to treat these pages as an app. It takes about fifteen seconds. Delete the icon and it is undone.

One tap from the home screen No address to type on a ward round

Opens with no signal A tool you have opened once opens again with no network

Updates itself A corrected dose reaches you on your next visit. Nothing to reinstall

Almost no storage The pages you open, and nothing else

The Steps

The tab below is chosen from the device you are reading on, and the guess is sometimes wrong. Change it if you are reading on one device and installing on another.

Android iPhone, iPad

1 Open the CDSS in Chrome

Open mediscuss.org/cdss in Chrome. Edge, Brave and Samsung Internet work the same way. Look at the top of the home page, beside the tool count.

The button sits beside the tool count.

2 Tap Install App

Chrome asks you to confirm, showing the name and the icon. Tap Install.

If no Install App button is showing, the CDSS is probably on the home screen already. If it is not, look in Chrome's own menu, the three dots at the top right. It carries Add to Home screen, or Install app.

Confirm with Install.

3 Open it from the home screen

The icon appears on the home screen and in the app drawer. Open it from there and you get the whole screen, with no address bar taking up the top of it.

To remove it later, press and hold the icon and uninstall it, as you would any other app.

It behaves like any other app.

1 Open the CDSS in Safari, then tap Share

Open mediscuss.org/cdss in Safari. The iPhone has no install button of its own, so all of this is done from the Share menu.

The Share button is a square with an arrow coming up out of it. On an iPhone it sits in the bar along the bottom of the screen. On recent versions of iOS it has moved behind the three dots beside the address bar. On an iPad it is at the top right.

The Share button in the bottom bar.

2 Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen

The Share menu opens from the bottom. The first part of it is a row of apps to send the page to. The list you want is below that, and Add to Home Screen sits a little way down it. Scroll the list, not the row of apps.

Below the row of applications.

3 Leave Open as Web App on, then tap Add

A confirmation screen shows the icon and the name, which you can shorten if you wish. Add is at the top right.

Recent versions of iOS also show a switch marked Open as Web App, or Install as Web App on some releases. It is on already. Leave it on. Turning it off makes the icon an ordinary Safari bookmark: it still opens the CDSS, but inside the browser rather than in its own window, and it will not open when there is no signal.

Leave the switch on, then Add.

If Something Is Not Where It Should Be

No Install App button on Android. The button shows only when the browser offers to install, so it is hidden once the CDSS is on the home screen. Chrome's own menu, the three dots at the top right, carries Add to Home screen in that case.
No Add to Home Screen on the iPhone. Chrome and Edge on iOS offer it from their own Share button on recent versions, but Safari always has it. If you are in another browser and cannot find the row, open the page in Safari and start again.
On a computer. Chrome and Edge show a small install symbol at the right-hand end of the address bar, and the Install App button works too. Safari on a Mac uses File, then Add to Dock. Firefox does not install web apps, and the CDSS works normally in it as a website.
Removing it. Press and hold the icon and delete it, as you would any other app. Nothing is left on the phone beyond the pages the browser had already kept.

What This Is, and What It Is Not

This is the website, kept on the home screen. It is not an app from the Play Store or the App Store, it has not been through their review, and it is not a regulated medical device. The tools, the content and the disclaimer are the same as in the browser.

What you enter into a tool stays on the device, whether the CDSS is installed or not, and is removed twelve hours after you last typed, or at once if you press Clear or sign out. Installing changes nothing about that; it is in fact the case installing needed, because a phone ends a backgrounded app within seconds and a half-filled form used to go with it. The one exception is a calculation you deliberately save while signed in, and the privacy notice sets out what that stores and for how long.

If a step above does not match what you see on your phone, please tell us. These screens change between releases, and a page describing the wrong one is worth correcting.

Tell us what you see