How to make any website into a webapp with macOS Sonoma

Now you can forget hunting through bookmarks and favorites for that site you need every day. And, what’s more, you can also forget having to dig for it through all the tabs, tab groups, and windows you have open in Safari.

Tab groups are excellent for organizing sites, but when you need one you know you’ve opened somewhere, they are still a chore to search through.

From macOS Sonoma onwards, though, you will be able to pick a website and turn it into its own, separate, standalone app. Choose the site, save it as a web app, and forever afterwards it can be in your Dock where you can see it any time you need.

1. Open Safari on a Mac and visit appleinsider.com
2. Choose the Share icon (toward top right, next to the plus sign)
3. Click on Add to Dock
4. Give the new app a short, memorable name instead of the extended website title
5. Click Add

That’s it. Once you’ve clicked Add, the new AppleInsider webapp appears in your Dock. From now on, you can launch that to use the full AppleInsider site.

You don’t have to leave the app in your Dock, though. As long as it isn’t running — you’ve chose File, Quit from its menu — then you can simply drag it away from the Dock.

If you drag a certain distance, you get a Remove button. It’s not really a button, though, more a label, since if you now let go of the app, it is removed from the Dock instantly.

You can still launch the app through Spotlight, Alfred, or any launcher app.

And you can find it in the Finder, too, but note that it’s not stored with most of your other applications. Instead, it’s in the different Applications folder that you find in the top level of your Mac’s directory.

So rather than being in the Applications folder that you have as a specific user of your Mac, it’s in the folder for apps that available to all logged-in users of that device.

You could already do much the same thing with many other third-party apps, including Unite which is on Setapp. If you already use that or any other webapp-making utility, there’s no advantage to redoing them with Apple’s solution.

But being able to create them so quickly, directly from the site’s Share menu, is a boon.

Plus Apple avoids the term “webapp,” and instead calls it all Add to Dock, which is so much more obvious that this is going to be how everyone does it from now on.

Apple’s forthcoming macOS Sonoma is expected to be released around September or October 2023. It is already available in beta form for testing, but AppleInsider recommends you wait for the final version.