Install SweepsOwl on your phone

SweepsOwl can sit on your home screen like any other app. On an iPhone that is the only way to get an alert when a bonus is ready; on Android it is a smaller but still useful step. This page covers what it really changes, how to do it, and what the alerts say once they start arriving.

What installing actually does

There is no app store and nothing to download. Installing saves SweepsOwl to your home screen and opens it in its own window, without the browser's address bar around it. It is the same app, the same account, and the same data.

What it gains you depends on the phone.

On an Android phone

Alerts already work without installing. If you switched on browser alerts in an ordinary Chrome tab, SweepsOwl can reach you with the browser closed. That is worth saying plainly, because plenty of apps tell you otherwise.

What installing adds is smaller, but real:

• Your alerts stop being fragile. Clearing your browser data quietly switches them off. An app on your home screen is far less likely to be swept up in that.
• Android is gentler with installed apps. The battery saver is much more willing to put a background browser tab to sleep than an app.
• An icon brings you back. This is the honest main reason. A tab buried in a tab strip reminds you of nothing. An icon sitting next to your other apps does.
• One tap, instead of typing the address.

On an iPhone or iPad

Here the install is the whole thing. Apple only lets a website send alerts once it has been added to the Home Screen. In an ordinary Safari tab you get nothing at all: no bonus reminder, no expiry warning, nothing. If you want SweepsOwl to tell you anything on an iPhone, this step is not optional.

Add it to your iPhone Home Screen

1. Open sweepsowl.com in Safari.
2. Tap the Share button — the square with an arrow pointing out of the top of it. It is at the bottom of the screen on an iPhone, top right on an iPad.
3. Scroll that list down to Add to Home Screen.
4. Tap Add, top right.

You should now have a SweepsOwl icon on your Home Screen. Open the app from that icon from now on, not from a browser tab, or you are back to a plain web page with no alerts.

If there is no "Add to Home Screen" in the list, you are not in Safari. Tapping a link inside another app — a text message, an email, Facebook, Reddit — usually opens a small built-in browser that only looks like Safari and cannot add anything to your Home Screen. Look for an Open in Safari option in the same Share menu, or type the address into Safari yourself and start again. Other browsers on an iPhone are not a reliable substitute either. Safari is the one that always works.

Add it to your Android home screen

Chrome usually offers on its own: take the Install button or the "Add to Home screen" banner if you see one.

If you do not see one, tap the three dots menu at the top right, then Add to Home screen (some versions call it Install app), then confirm with Install.

Where your browser supports it, SweepsOwl also offers an install button of its own inside the app. It does exactly the same thing.

Turn the alerts on

Do this after installing, from the installed app.

1. Open SweepsOwl from your new home-screen icon.
2. Go to Settings and find the Notifications section.
3. In the table of alerts, switch on the Browser & push column. The switch at the top of that column turns on every kind at once; the switches below it let you pick — coins at risk, daily bonus ready, freebies and sales, announcements.
4. Your phone will ask whether to allow notifications. Choose Allow.

Answer that phone question carefully, especially on an iPhone. If you tap "Don't Allow", the app cannot ask you again. Undoing it means going into the phone's own Settings, finding SweepsOwl in the notifications list, and switching it back on there.

Alerts are set per device. Switching them on on your phone does not change anything on your laptop, and the other way round.

Turn them off again

Same place. Switch the Browser & push column off in Settings and that device stops receiving alerts. Switch off a single row instead and only that kind stops — you can keep the expiry warnings and drop the daily bonus reminders, for example.

You can also silence them from outside the app, in your phone's own notification settings for SweepsOwl. On an iPhone, deleting the Home Screen icon removes the app and its alerts along with it.

What the alerts say

Every alert arrives titled SweepsOwl, and the line underneath is a count:

• 3 daily bonuses ready
• 1 balance expiring soon
• 2 new freebies available
• 1 new announcement

Tap it and the app opens where you can act on it.

Now and then you get a short status line instead of a count. "Signed out" means your session has ended and you need to sign in again before alerts can tell you anything useful. If your phone is offline when an alert arrives, it waits quietly and finishes delivering once you are back on a network — and if the thing it was about has been handled by then, it says nothing at all rather than pinging you about a bonus you already collected.

What the alerts never show

No casino names. No balances. No amounts. That is deliberate, and it is worth knowing why.

The alert reaches your phone through Apple's or Google's notification service, and the message we hand them is empty. It carries nothing about you — it only wakes the app up. The app then asks SweepsOwl, over your own signed-in session, how many things are waiting, and puts that number on the screen. So a count is the most that anyone glancing at your lock screen can learn, and the services in the middle never see even that.

If you want the detail, open the app.

If you do your collecting on a computer

Install it on your phone anyway. A closed laptop cannot tell you a bonus is ready, and a bonus you are not told about is the one you miss. Your account is the same on both, so signing in on the phone takes a minute and you can carry on collecting wherever you prefer.