You want LumaVista in its own window with its own icon, rather than one tab among thirty. That takes about ten seconds, and it works differently on Android, on desktop Chrome and on iPhone. This guide covers all three — and, just as importantly, what installing does not do, so you are not surprised on a train with no signal.

What installing gives you

An installed LumaVista opens in its own window with no browser address bar, from its own icon on your home screen or dock. It starts at the app root and uses the app’s own dark theme colour for the system chrome.

That is the whole of it. It is the same application, signed in the same way, talking to the same server.

Android and desktop Chrome

When your browser supports installing, LumaVista shows an install prompt in the banner area at the top of the app: Install LumaVista, with an Install button. Dismiss it with the × if you are not interested — the dismissal is remembered on that device and survives signing out, so it will not nag you again.

The permanent home for the same control is the General tab in Settings, under Install app. Use it whenever you like, including long after you dismissed the banner.

Press Install, confirm your browser’s dialog, and you are done. Afterwards the settings section reports that LumaVista is installed on this device.

Two details that explain odd behaviour:

Browsers announce installability once per page load and never repeat it. LumaVista captures that announcement before the page finishes rendering, on every route including the login page, which is why the install control is reliably armed rather than only working if you happen to be on the right screen.
If your browser never announces it, the settings section says installation is not available in this browser rather than showing a button that would do nothing.

iPhone and iPad

Safari on iOS has no install API. No website can offer an install button there, so LumaVista shows instructions instead:

Open LumaVista in Safari — not Chrome, Firefox or Edge, and not the in-app browser you get when you tap a link inside another app.
Tap the Share button.
Choose Add to Home Screen.

The result is the same standalone, chrome-less window that Android gets.

LumaVista only shows this guidance in real iOS Safari. In the other iOS browsers and in in-app browsers, Add to Home Screen either does not exist or does not produce a working app, so no guidance is offered rather than sending you looking for a menu item that is not there.

Other browsers

Where neither path is available, the Install app section says so plainly. Nothing is broken — LumaVista runs fully in any modern browser as an ordinary tab.

What installing does not change

This is the part worth reading twice, because “installed app” sets expectations that do not apply here.

There is no offline mode. LumaVista registers a service worker, and it caches nothing at all. It exists solely to satisfy the browser’s checklist for treating the site as installable; every request goes straight to the network exactly as if it were not there. With no connection, the installed app fails the same way a browser tab does. This is a deliberate design decision, not an oversight: the app is session-locked and end-to-end encrypted, and cached responses would risk serving one person’s data or stale sign-in state.
There is no background activity. A closed installed app does nothing. It does not sync, and it does not deliver push notifications. Email is the channel that reaches you when you are not in the app — see Settings and Notifications for which notifications you get and how to change them.
Your session and encryption behave identically. Same sign-in, same session lock, same device enrolment. Installing is not enrolling a device, and it neither weakens nor strengthens anything described in Setting Up Your Encryption.
There is no separate copy of your data. Same account, same projects, same knowledge base. Installing and uninstalling on one device changes nothing for your other devices.

Updating and removing it

There is no app store and no update to install. The installed app loads the current version from the server every time it opens, and because nothing is cached there is no stale-version trap to clear.

To remove it, uninstall it the way you remove any app on that platform. Your account and your work live on the server, so removing the icon loses none of it. One caveat: your device’s encryption key is held in that browser’s own storage, so if you also clear the site’s stored data you will need to enrol the device again the next time you sign in — Setting Up Your Encryption covers what that looks like.

Settings and Notifications — where the install control lives, and the email notifications an installed app still cannot deliver
Navigating the Interface — how the layout adapts to a phone-sized screen
Setting Up Your Encryption — devices, enrolment and recovery