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Install on your phone

Installing puts Blackstart on your home screen and keeps a full copy on the device. After that it opens and works with no power, no Wi-Fi and no cell signal.

iPhone / iPad — Safari

  1. Open this page in Safari. Other browsers on iOS cannot install it properly.
  2. Tap the Share button — the square with an arrow pointing up.
  3. Scroll down and tap Add to Home Screen.
  4. Tap Add. A Blackstart icon appears on your home screen.
  5. Open it from that icon once, while you still have signal, so it can finish caching everything.

Android — Chrome

  1. Open this page in Chrome.
  2. Tap the ⋮ menu.
  3. Tap Add to Home screen (or Install app).
  4. Open it once from the new icon while you still have signal.
Installing is not just a shortcut. Safari clears cached data for ordinary bookmarked sites after about a week of no visits. Web apps added to the home screen are exempt from that. So installing is what actually makes the offline copy stick around until you need it.

Why this matters

An outage usually takes your router down with it, and regional outages tend to congest the cell network at the same moment everyone reaches for their phone. A reference you have to download during the emergency is not a reference.

Blackstart ships everything it needs — the panel schedule, the step photos, the walkthrough — into the device up front. There are no fonts, scripts or images loaded from anywhere else.

Keep a paper copy too. A phone with a dead battery is no better than a website you cannot reach. Print the panel schedule and tape it inside the panel door.

Updating

When the data changes, open the app while you have a connection and it will pull the new copy. If it looks stale, close it fully and reopen it — the updated version is applied on the next launch.