What are Web Clips on iOS?

Web Clips, not to be confused by Web Apps, is a feature to make your weblinks more accessible without you needing to open a browser every single time. When in use, they look just like an app among all the other apps on your device. You get to customize the icon and pick a name for it. iPhones had gotten support for web clips since the iOS 4 version. This feature is also available for iPadOS and macOS devices.
Web Clips functionality doesn’t just limit to web links. You could also use it for

• Frequently used contacts to either call or compose SMS
• Viewing PDFs or video files with external-facing links
• Composing a mail to a frequently used recipient
• iTunes music links
• Face time links
• FTP file links
• iBooks files
• iCloud shared documents
• Opening a specific location in maps
• App store app links

Apart from the special cases like contacts and addresses, you could open all of them in browsers like Chrome, Safari or Firefox provided you gave the appropriate prefix. By default, it opens them on Safari.

And now for the big question, how to get Web Clips on your device? As I mentioned before, you could access this feature using an MDM or even better, a UEM like Hexnode. Down are the steps you need to follow:

1. Setup the device by enrolling it into your network.
2. Add the web app to your portal by giving in the URL, name, and the icon picture.
3. Create a new Web Clips policy.
4. Configure the policy by adding the created web app.
5. Save it and associate it to the targeted device.

These are only the basic steps to follow although, they might be a bit different depending on the solution you use.
While configuring the policy you could choose to make them non-removable so users won’t be able to remove it as long as the policy is associated with the device. You could also check the option to open the URL in Full-Screen mode where it will be opened as a Web App with no URLs, search bars and bookmarks.