Put it on your Home Screen.
Then it can reach you.

1. 1

   Tap Share

   The Share button is the square with an arrow coming out of the top of it, in the middle of Safari's toolbar. It is the same button you would use to send someone a link.

2. 2

   Scroll down to Add to Home Screen

   The sheet opens on a row of apps you could send the page to. Ignore those: the list underneath is the one you want, and Add to Home Screen sits a few rows down, under the bookmark and favorites entries.

3. 3

   Tap Add

   iOS offers to let you rename the icon first, with the keyboard already up. Leave it alone and it says OtherSide, which is the point.

4. 4

   Open it from the Home Screen

   From now on, open OtherSide from that icon rather than from a Safari tab. It loads the same site with no address bar and no toolbar — and, unlike the tab, it is something Apple will deliver a notification to.

   You may have to sign in again the first time. iOS keeps the Home Screen copy's cookies separate from Safari's, so it starts out as a browser that has never seen you. Same account, same everything — a passkey or an emailed code gets you straight back in. More on signing in.

1. 5

   Profile, then Turn on push in this browser

   Open your profile and scroll to Push notifications. If you find a paragraph about the Share menu where the button should be, you are still in Safari rather than in the Home Screen copy — go back and open the icon.

2. 6

   Tap Allow

   The button exists so that iOS only ever asks when you were expecting it. Tap Allow and the browser is enrolled a second later; your profile then lists it, with a way to turn it off again.

   Tap Don't Allow and the button cannot ask a second time — nothing on this site can undo that. The way back is Settings → Notifications → OtherSide → Allow Notifications, and then the button again.

3. 7

   Pick what's worth a buzz

   Every kind of notification has its own row and its own push checkbox. What is on by default is what most people would want interrupting them — a friend taking your side, a handshake offered, a result — and none of it is a rule.

   Everything lands under the bell whatever you choose here; the checkboxes are only about what reaches you when you aren't looking. There is no test button, either: the next friend request or handshake offer is the test.

There's no Add to Home Screen in the share sheet

Two usual causes. You're in a different browser, or the page was opened inside another app — a link tapped in Messages or Instagram opens in that app's own browser, which has a share sheet of its own. Open Safari and go to otherside.app directly. The other cause is an iPhone older than iOS 16.4, which is where Apple added web push at all; Settings → General → Software Update says which you're on.

The profile page tells me to tap Share instead of showing a button

That's the app saying it can tell it's in an ordinary tab. It isn't a bug and there's nothing to retry: the button appears only inside the Home Screen copy, because on iOS that's the only place a subscription can be made at all. Close the tab, open the icon, and go to your profile from there.

I tapped Don't Allow

iOS remembers that and won't ask again, and no site can reverse it from the inside. Settings → Notifications → OtherSide → Allow Notifications, then press the button on your profile once more. If OtherSide isn't in that list at all, the Home Screen copy has never asked — do step 5 first.

Push is on and nothing arrives

Check the bell in the app first: if the notification is there but never reached your phone, it's a delivery problem; if it isn't there, nothing has happened yet. A Focus mode, or iOS's scheduled notification summary, will hold notifications back — Settings → Notifications → OtherSide is where both are decided. One deliberate quirk: news with a shelf life is dropped rather than sent late, so a handshake offer older than six hours won't buzz you, though it is still waiting under the bell.

I deleted the icon, or cleared the app's data

That ends its push subscription — there is no browser left to deliver to. Add it to the Home Screen again and turn push back on inside it. The stale entry on your profile can be turned off there, and the first push that bounces cleans it up on its own anyway.

Do I have to do this on my laptop too?

Turn push on there, yes; add anything to a Home Screen, no. Push is per browser rather than per account, so every browser you want buzzing you needs its own trip to the profile page. Only iOS makes installing a precondition.

Installing it is still pleasant on Android: Chrome's ⋮ menu has Add to Home screen, and on a desktop there is usually an install icon at the end of the address bar. Either gets you the icon and a window without tabs. What neither gets you is push, because you already had it.